High performance work practices : investigating four perspectives on their employee-level impacts simultaneously

• Main Author: Ogbonnaya, Chidiebere
• Published: University of East Anglia 2013
• Subjects: 658
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.590782

This thesis has examined simultaneously two key debates of the High Performance Work Practices (HPWP) literature. The first debate, entitled ‘the integrationist and isolationist perspectives of HPWP’, looks at two methods of operationalizing HPWP. In the integrationist perspective, innovative Human Resource Management (HRM) practices are presumed to have mutually supportive properties such that when used together in a coherent manner, they may accrue far-reaching benefits for the organization and employees. By contrast, the isolationist perspective argues that individual HRM practices have unique independent properties and produce varying degrees of effects on outcomes. The second debate, entitled ‘the mutual gains versus the critical perspectives of HPWP’, looks at the employee-level implications of adopting HPWP. In the mutual gains perspective, HPWP are thought to promote desirable employee attitudes and well-being together with their beneficial effects on organizational growth and effectiveness. The critical perspective, on the other hand, assumes that the benefits associated with HPWP may be offset by increases in work intensification and the transfer of more work responsibilities to employees. These two debates have been investigated via two empirical studies. The first study was undertaken to examine the tenets of the two HPWP debates without consideration of sector-specific characteristics, whereas the second study was undertaken to highlight the role of sector-specific characteristics in explaining the employee-level implications of HPWP. Together, both studies provide a framework for determining the extent to which HPWP outcomes are generalizable across organizational settings. The results of both studies show that HPWP produce varying independent effects on employee-level outcomes, and work intensification may explain the intermediary processes underlying some of these effects. The results also indicate that HPWP have mutually supportive properties, and produce beneficial integrated influences on employee attitudes and well-being. However, when the independent iv and integrated effects of HPWP were examined simultaneously, the independent effects of HPWP accounted for variance in employee attitudes and well-being over and above the integrated effects of HPWP.