No abstract

This paper examines relationships between human resource management (HRM), work climate, and organizational performance in the branch network of a retail bank. It extends previous research on grouplevel climate-performance and HRM-performance relationships and examines how climate and HRM function as joint antecedents of business unit performance. Significant correlations are found between work climate, human resource practices, and business performance. The results show that the correlations between climate and performance cannot be explained by their common dependence on HRM factors, and that the data are consistent with a mediation model in which the effects of HRM practices on business performance are partially mediated by work climate.Few organizations can evaluate their performance accurately by averaging the performance of their employees. In most cases, the performance of an organization is determined by the productivity and efficiency of such higher-level organizational entities as departments, retail outlets, plants, or teams. In the language of operations research, these productive entities are called "decision-making units" (DMUs). DMUs can be compared to each other when they consume the same type of resources and produce the same type of outputs. Examples of DMUs within an organization are branches of a bank, stores in a retail chain, or assembly lines in a factory. At a higher level, whole organizations in the same industry can also be treated as DMUs.Despite the practical importance of DMU performance for managing organizations, research on the psychology of work effectiveness has historically been focused on performance outcomes at the individual employee, rather than at the DMU, level. Thus, in a recent metaanalysis of job attitudes and performance, Judge, Thoreson, Bono, and

Research has shown that organizational subunits where employee perceptions are favourable enjoy superior business performance. The service profit chain model of business performance (Heskett, Sasser, & Schlesinger, 1997) has identified customer satisfaction as a critical intervening variable in this relationship. This paper examines the relationships between organizational climate, employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, and sales performance in the retail‐banking sector. The role of customer satisfaction as a mediator between employee attitudes and sales performance is examined in a large sample of bank branches, spanning multiple organizations. Mediation effects are found, which border on significance when the sample size is large, but the effects seem to be too small to be of practical importance. It is argued that alternative formulations of the service profit chain model may provide more powerful explanations of the link between employee attitudes and business performance.

We argue that current concepts of knowledge management and organizational learning are, by themselves, limited in their ability to improve organizational effectiveness. We show how these concepts may be usefully integrated with organizational creativity and innovation within a single framework that combines the apprehension of knowledge with the creative utilization of such knowledge. Field research and experience are described showing how this framework has been applied to achieve measurable improvements in effectiveness in a wide range of organizations.

This paper reviews the literature on the association between lean production and performance. From this, propositions on the integration and evolution of operation and human resource management practices associated with the lean production concept are developed. Using 24 years of data on the use of seven core OM and HRM practices in British manufacturing firms, the potential link between integration in the use of practices and productivity is tested. In each year, three latent clusters are identified via ordered restricted latent class models; the cluster that consistently makes a more integrated use of practices outperforms the others. Furthermore, the longitudinal nature of the data permits modeling the growth curves of each practice in the sample, recognizing any similarity in growth and investigating whether or not an early integration in adoption of practices is associated with higher final productivity. The results show that pioneers are more productive, thus suggesting that the head start in integrating core OM and HRM practices associated with the lean production concept has paid off.