Human Resource Management Systems and Work Engagement: Exploring the Impact of Employee Paternalistic Values

Abstract

Organizations implement high-commitment human resource management (HRM) systems to increase work engagement as they provide employees with a sense of being looked after in the workplace. This relationship is rarely considered alongside the responsibility of management to look after employees beyond the workplace too in return for hard work and loyalty, as represented by paternalistic values. This study, therefore, investigates the effect of high-commitment HRM systems on work engagement, mediated by employees perceiving the HRM system to be distinctive, consistent, and consensual (i.e., a strong system), and moderated by employee belief in paternalistic values. Based on an empirical study of 384 employees, high-commitment HRM is found to increase work engagement as hypothesized. However, HRM system strength does not mediate this relationship as expected and instead is associated with lower levels of work engagement. When testing for the moderating effect of employee belief in paternalistic values, when this is low, high HRM system strength leads to lower levels of work engagement. These findings imply that strong HRM systems may be perceived as intrusive, as paternalism may be, for employees with low belief in paternalistic values.

A meta‐analysis on employee perceptions of human resource strength: Examining the mediating versus moderating hypotheses

“…For the lagged studies, we recorded the time that had elapsed between the measurement of perceived HR strength and the later measurement of outcomes. The interval ranged from 3 weeks (Farndale, Metto, & Nakhle, 2020) to a year (Bednall & Sanders, 2017).…”

“…However, inspection of the items used to measure the practices revealed that enhancing employee performance appeared to be a goal of even nominally commitment-focused practices. For instance, the high-commitment HRM scale used by Sanders et al (2008) and Bednall and Sanders (2017) referred to employee training as a key HR activity, and the "high-commitment" scale used in Farndale et al (2020) was adapted from the high-performance work systems scale of Sun et al (2007). As improved employee performance appears to have been an explicit goal across almost all of HR practice bundles studied in the meta-analysis, it follows that HR strength enhances the ability of bundles to achieve this espoused goal.…”