High performance work systems and employee mental health: The roles of psychological empowerment, work role overload, and organizational identification

Abstract

Employee mental health is a central issue in today's global workplace. This paper analyzes the effect of high performance work systems (HPWSs) on employee mental health. We integrate HPWS concepts with job demands‐resources (JD‐R) theory to examine competing theoretical perspectives—a positive HPWS influence and a negative HPWS influence on employee mental health. We examine employees' perceptions of psychological empowerment as an indicator of the motivational pathway of the JD‐R and work‐role overload as an indicator of the strain pathway to explain the differential effect of HPWSs on mental health. We also incorporate organizational identification theory to demonstrate how one's identification with the organization can either accentuate or attenuate feelings of both psychological empowerment and work‐role overload. Findings from a study of 999 employees in 174 South Korean organizations indicate that HPWSs are positively associated with employee mental health via employee perceptions of empowerment and that HPWSs are negatively associated with employee mental health through perceptions of work‐role overload. Furthermore, the study finds that organizational identification attenuates the relationship between HPWS and both empowerment and overload. Practice‐level post hoc analyses also reveal that the job design characteristics, pay level, and participative decision‐making are linked to empowerment. In addition, participative decision‐making is most strongly associated with work overload.

How does Human Resource Management help service organizations to thrive in uncertainties and risks: Postcrisis as a context

“…The third theoretical perspective is based on theories related to workplace stress represented by the conservation of resource theory (e.g., Liu et al, 2020), job demands‐resource model (e.g., Jensen et al, 2013), and transactional stress theory (e.g., Hauff et al, 2022). The studies in this perspective reveal how perceived HR practices lead to diverse outcomes by manipulating stressful work experiences or directly leveraging stress levels (e.g., role ambiguity, Kilroy et al, 2017; workload, Kim et al, 2023, and emotional exhaustion, Yang et al, 2021).…”

Untangling human resource management and employee wellbeing relationships: Differentiating job resource HR practices from challenge demand HR practices

“…While the JD‐R model is widely used in the strain literature, management scholars have only recently begun to recognize the potential of HR practices to function as both resources and stressors (cf. Kim et al., 2022). Connecting to the strain literature, in this study, not only do we discuss the varying resources/demands functions of HR practices, but we introduce a mediating mechanism via a common measure of challenge demand consisting of time pressure and workload, through which our proposed functions of different HR practices are further supported.…”