How Reflective Practice Generates Absorptive Capacity in Strategic Leadership: submission #18205

Human resource analytics (HRA) is a strategic lever, yet little is understood about how human resource (HR) analysts make analytics actionable in organizational decision-making. Existing research is tool-centric and decontextualized, offering limited insight into the cognitive and discursive processes through which analysts influence strategy. Drawing on sensemaking and microfoundational perspectives, and using a longitudinal qualitative study of 30 analysts in multinational enterprise subsidiaries, we develop a process framework explaining how analysts construct, negotiate, and mobilize meaning across four interlinked phases of HRA projects: problem definition, data contextualization, narrative construction, and decision enablement. Cognitive–discursive practices are identified, underpinning each phase and the supra-organizational, structural, relational, and individual microfoundations that condition them. Our framework demonstrates that analysts’ strategic impact depends not only on analytical proficiency but also on narrative competence, political acuity, and the relational infrastructure that fosters shared meaning and action. This study deepens the theoretical understanding of the “doing” of HR analytics and offers guidance for designing organizational contexts that enhance analysts’ strategic contributions to decision-making. Finally, the research offers practical implications for HRM, emphasizing that HR analysts function as translators and credibility brokers, whose effectiveness requires supportive organizational structures, relational exposure, and dialogical engagement.