How and when matter: Exploring the interaction effects of high‐performance work systems, employee participation, and human capital on organizational innovation

Abstract

Existing research on the relationship between high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational innovation has paid insufficient attention to the boundary effects of employee participation and human capital. Bridging the human resource management (HRM) and employment relations literature, this study contributes to the contingency view of HRM and China‐specific research by investigating how human capital and employee participation, direct voice mechanism, and corporate governance participation jointly moderate the relationship between HPWS and organizational innovation. We test our three‐way interaction model using a sample of 108 firms and 1,250 employees in China. The results suggest that HPWS are positively associated with organizational innovation when employees with relatively less human capital are coupled with more direct voice mechanism or less corporate governance participation. In contrast, HPWS are negatively related to organizational innovation when employees possessing greater human capital are coupled with more direct voice mechanism. The theoretical and managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.

Top-down, bottom-up or outside-in? An examination of triadic mechanisms on firm innovation in Chinese firms

“…In other words, the bureaucratic structure is not always destructive for innovation in all kinds of firms, which may deepen our understanding of the complicated influence of the bureaucratic structure. For high-involvement HRM systems, although researchers speak highly of its positive effect on innovation (Bhattacharya et al 2005;De Dreu and West 2001;Martínez-Sánchez et al 2011;Shin et al 2016;Zhou et al 2019), our results show that it is only positively related to the first stage of innovation (i.e. innovation invention) for SOEs, and more notably, high-involvement HRM systems are negatively related to the second stage of innovation (i.e.…”

“…Innovation is crucial for today's organizations to create and sustain competitive advantages (Brem et al 2016;Herrera 2015;He et al 2019;Huang et al 2016;Rialp-Criado and Komochkova 2017). Micro and macro studies alike have sought to identify the determinants of firm innovation (Ahuja et al 2008;Crossan and Apaydin 2010;Jing et al 2017;Luong et al 2017;Rothaermel and Hess 2007;Zhou et al 2019), which range from structural characteristics (Damanpour 1991;Damanpour and Aravind 2011;Jia et al 2019) to human capital and social networks (Ahuja 2000;Bornay-Barrachina et al 2016;Yang and Shafi 2019;Subramaniam and Youndt 2005;Zhang et al 2017). A recent constructive review of the cumulated literature on innovation, however, suggests that despite the multi-level, multi-facet, and complex nature of innovation, each study has tended to adopt a one-dimensional definition of innovation, tackle innovation from a single level of conceptualization and use variables from one sub-field of research, which present a vastly heterogeneous and fragmented picture of innovation (Anderson et al 2014).…”

Impact of Organizational Innovation on Work Performance: The Mediating Effect of Work Resources in Public-Sector Organizations

“…The public employee's innovation and creativity are essential parts of the organizational innovation (Higgins 1995;Zhao et al 2020). Moreover, employee's active participation also plays meaningful function to the performance work system (Zhou et al 2019) based on the principle of equity that organizational members are treated fairly in the allocation of resources (Adams 1965;Oh 2019), ─ as also work resources through novel ideas and creativities into the better organizational work performance. And so, the mediating effects of work resources comprising people, process, and technology within public-sector organizations are crucially pivotal.…”

Ambidextrous Relationships and Social Capability as Employee Well-Being: The Secret Sauce for Research and Development and Sustainable Innovation Performance

“…Authors such as Gratton and Ghoshal [8], Byrne et al [56], and Eva et al [57] argue that close informal networks among employees are direct sources of innovation and R&D. In this way, through mutual trust, engagement, internal values, cooperation, or the exchange of knowledge, important results can be obtained in terms of innovation and R&D [58]. Specifically, authors such as Gratton and Ghoshal [8] argue that aspects such as relaxed meetings, consensus, and cooperation are factors that positively influence product innovation.…”