Strategic Human Resource Management, Employee Well-Being, and Talent Retention in Family-Run Digital Tourism and Hospitality SMEs: A Conceptual Framework

Family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) dominate the tourism and hospitality sector, and a growing number are digitalizing while retaining their family character. The present study develops a multi-level conceptual framework explaining how strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices support talent retention in these firms under digital transformation. Three research streams bear on the question, namely strategic HRM and employee well-being, socioemotional wealth in family business, and digital transformation in tourism and hospitality, and each rests on an assumption that the other two contradict in this setting, concerning respectively the formality of the HR system, the stability of the relational channel of delivery, and the irrelevance of ownership structure to how employees experience technology. Drawing on the deliberate–emergent strategy distinction and on the separation between intended, implemented, and perceived HR practices, the study argues that strategic HRM in these firms is emergent rather than absent. Seven propositions are formulated from job demands–resources and socioemotional wealth theory, according to which SHRM practices support retention through employee well-being, family involvement strengthens this conversion, digital transformation weakens it, the two organizational forces interact, and the external labor environment conditions the outcome. The framework identifies the mechanism through which digitalization erodes the HR advantage of family firms, which rests on the channel of implementation rather than family ownership as such.