Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources (2018) 56, 341–359 doi:10.1111/1744-7941.

12140

High-performance work systems and

employee engagement: empirical evidence
from China
Yufang Huang Jiangnan University, China
Zhenzhong Ma Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China
University of Windsor, Canada
Yong Meng Shanghai University of Engineering Science, China

Employee engagement and commitment has been a very important issue in human resource
managers’ agenda. The present study adds to the literature by examining the impact of high-per-
formance work systems (HPWS) on employee attitudes and on employee engagement in China
in response to the increasing interest in the universalistic effects of HPWS in the globalized
world market. With the data from 782 employees working in China’s manufacturing and service
sectors, this study shows that HPWS are positively related to employees’ positive mood and job
satisfaction, and that job satisfaction and positive mood lead to high employee engagement.
Moreover, employee’s positive mood and job satisfaction also mediate the relationship between
HPWS and employee engagement. The result helps explore one mechanism via which HPWS
affect employee behaviors and provides empirical evidence for the applicability of HPWS in an
international context.

Keywords: China, employee engagement, high-performance work systems

Key points
1 High-performance work systems (HPMS) are positively related to employees’ mood
and job satisfaction in China.
2 HPMS lead to high employee engagement in China.
3 Employee mood and job satisfaction play important roles in HPMS for Chinese
employees.
4 This study provides empirical evidence for HPMS in a global context.

Correspondence: Dr Zhenzhong Ma, School of Business, Shanghai University of International

Business and Economics, Shanghai, China; Odette School of Business, University of Windsor,
Windsor, ON, Canada N9B 3P4; e-mail: maz@uwindsor.ca
and
Dr Yong Meng, School of Management, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai,
China; e-mail: mengyong1992@163.com
Accepted for publication 19 December 2016.
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Research has shown that an engaged workforce can lead to numerous benefits, such as
high organizational performance, high job satisfaction (e.g. Harrison, Newman and Roth
2006; Harter, Schmidt and Hayes 2002; Whitman, Van Rooij and Viswesvaran 2010), and
low turnover rates (Allen, Shore and Griffeth 2003). Highly engaged employees have a
passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their company while disengaged
employees put only time, not energy or attention into their work (Bal, Dorien and De
Jong 2013). Engaged employees are thus more enthusiastic, working harder, and are more
committed to their company (Kahn 1990). They are also more creative (Sahoo and Mishra
2012), more likely to perform better (Whitman, Van Rooij and Viswesvaran 2010), and
can often help create and further maintain sustainable competitive advantage for their
companies (Rich, Lepine and Crawford 2010). Given the strong need for high engagement
and commitment among a changing and increasingly diversified workforce, an increasing
amount of research on human resource management has focused on exploring the univer-
salistic effects of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on employee performance
(Snape and Redman 2010) and on the mechanism through which the HPWS relate to
employee outcomes (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Jiang et al. 2012).
High-performance work systems refer to a set of broadly defined human resource
management (HRM) practices, including performance-related pay, various employee
communication programs, training and team-based work (Harley 2002; Huselid 1995;
Jiang et al. 2012), and when used in combination, HPWS are said to be mutually reinforc-
ing and able to generate superior organizational performance (Harley 2002; Combs et al.
2006). While an impressive array of research has explored HPWS and organizational
performance in the West, relatively little has been done to explore the effectiveness of
HPWS in an international context (Ghebregiorgis and Karsten 2007), even though the
universalistic effect of HPWS has been the focus for many studies in the HRM field. When
multinational enterprises seek international expansion and offshore outsourcing in the
emerging markets where contemporary management practices have yet to be validated,
HRM theories developed in the West are often subject to criticism in that they are not
sufficiently contextualized and thus may not be effective in a different cultural context.
This study is intended to help bridge the gap in exploration of the implications of HPWS
in the Chinese context by examining the impact of HPWS on Chinese employees’ affective
mood and their job satisfaction, and also on their engagement in the workplace.
Studying HPWS practices and employee attitudes and behaviors in China also has
important practical implications (Fan et al. 2014; Sun, Aryee and Law 2007; Zhang et al.
2013). Although China has become the world’s manufacturing center for the past years
thanks to its large and relatively cheap labor force, employee engagement in China is actu-
ally alarmingly low, if not the lowest among the world: according to a Gallup survey, only
2% of Chinese employees were engaged in their work in the year 2009 (the number
increased to 6% in 2012, which is still very low), compared with the global average of 11%
(Yu and Srinivasan 2013). With such a large number of disengaged employees, China’s
economic growth and the competitive advantage brought by its cheap labor force will not

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sustain. It is thus imperative to explore whether HPWS can improve Chinese employees’
engagement at the workplace in order to find viable solutions to this alarming issue.
In this study, we sampled a range of workplaces in different sectors in China using
employees’ rating of HPWS practices to predict their attitudes and engagement behaviors.
This approach allows us to go beyond the study on HPWS practices and organizational
performance at the organizational level by focusing on individual employees and their
behaviors in order to help examine the black box of how HPWS practices affect work per-
formance at individual level (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Ramsay, Scholarios and Har-
ley 2000). In the following sections, we will first review the studies of HPWS to develop
hypotheses in order to test them in the Chinese context. We then present our methodol-
ogy, data collection, and results, concluding the paper with a discussion of the implica-
tions and limitations of the study for further research.

Conceptual framework and hypotheses

High-performance work systems and employee engagement
Over the past decades, a burgeoning body of literature has emerged on the ways in which
human resource practices affect organizational performance (Combs et al. 2006), and
prominent among this literature is the concept of HPWS, which claim to have strong
effects on employee work outcomes and organizational performance (Snape and Redman
2010). According to social exchange theory (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Blau 1964),
individuals in a social exchange relationship are normally viewed as emotional beings who
obtain information, cognitively process it, and then make decisions concerning the nature
and pattern of exchange with organizations. The exchange process thus produces emo-
tions and feelings which lead individuals to attribute these emotions to different social
units such as their organizations. These attributions of emotion, in turn, dictate how
strongly individuals feel attached to their organizations, which further drives engagement
behavior and commitment to the relationship (Blau 1964; Lawler 2001). Based on the
social exchange theory, HPWS scholars expect that since HPWS focus on providing sup-
port to employee development by enriching job, enhancing employee job skills, and
encouraging participative decision-making (Snape and Redman 2010), HPWS will be
reciprocated by employees through increased work engagement and commitment to the
organizations, which consequently leads to high organizational performance (Bal, Dorien
and De Jong 2013; Shore and Shore 1995). In other words, when people engage in a social
exchange relationship and voluntarily act in favor of another party, they expect this favor
will be reciprocated in the future (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Blau 1964). When an
organization employs HPWS, there will be an expectation that employees will return this
investment through higher engagement and commitment. This is in line with research
demonstrating that work engagement mediates the relationships between job resources
(which result from human resource practices offered by the organization) and job per-
formance (Christian, Garza and Slaughter 2011), and thus forms a crucial positive link

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between what the organization offers to employees and how the employees perform in
return. This body of work on HPWS is now extensive, with a 2006 meta-analysis of 92 stud-
ies on the HPWS – organizational performance relationship showing that HPWS indeed are
impactful (Combs et al. 2006; Snape and Redman 2010).
In contrast to the notion that there exists a positive relationship between HPWS prac-
tices and organizational performance, many scholars also contend that managers in the
capitalist system are constantly driven to find ways to make employees work longer and
harder as a means to maximize labor input (Braverman 1974; Harley 2002; Ramsay, Schol-
arios and Harley 2000), and thus HPWS actually lead, directly or indirectly, to work inten-
sification. Employees working under the HPWS practices may suffer a higher level of
stress, overload, burnout, and heightened pressure than other workers, arising directly
from HPWS work practices as well as indirectly from added responsibility, enhanced dis-
cretion, and work intensification (Ramsay, Scholarios and Harley 2000). This dark side of
HPWS suggests that while HPWS are aimed to creating a competitive advantage for organ-
izations, they may bring benefits to organizations at the expense of employees and thus
result in negative consequences for individual workers (Jensen, Patel and Messersmith
2013).
Given these contrasting views on the impact of HPWS practices on employee and
organizational performance, it is more meaningful to explore whether HPWS is able to
generate positive impact in an international context. In this study we argue that the social-
exchange based relationship between HPWS and employee engagement still exists in an
international context. More specifically, we contend that, according to social exchange
theory, HPWS can produce emotions and feelings which lead individuals to attribute
these emotions to their exchange partners or organizations even in an international con-
text. For HPWS in the Chinese context in particular, it is widely accepted that Chinese cul-
ture is a highly collectivistic culture (Hofstede 2001; Triandis 1995) and group-oriented
Chinese employees are by nature motivated to work harder for the collective good and for
their company than for themselves. In addition, the strong guanxi-oriented Chinese soci-
ety relies heavily on reciprocity (Hofstede 2001; Tsui and Farh 1997; Xin and Pearce
1996), an important element of the social exchange relationship. As a result, the Chinese
are likely to reciprocate the favor they receive either in their social lives or at the workplace
(Tsui and Farh 1997; Xin and Pearce 1996; Yang 1994). Therefore, it is proposed that a
positive relationship also exists between HPWS practices and employee engagement in
China due to the strong favor-returning orientation embedded in the Chinese guanxi soci-
ety (Fan et al. 2014; Sun, Aryee and Law 2007; Zhang et al. 2013). In other words, when
HPWS practices are applied in Chinese companies as a favor to employees, management
cedes a degree of control to employees and introduces a set of employee-oriented progres-
sive methods such as teamwork, training and development, frequent open communica-
tion, performance-based compensation, participative decision-making, and other
employee involvement programs. It is thus very likely that Chinese employees will return
the favor by working hard and performing well with highly engaged behaviors, resulting
in high employee engagement. Therefore, it is expected that:
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Hypothesis 1: High-performance work systems will enhance employees’ engagement.

High-performance work systems and employee attitudes and behaviors

Much of the early work evaluating the impact of HPWS practices on work per-
formance focused on the issues at the organizational level (Huselid 1995), and exam-
ined the effect of HPWS practices on organizational outcomes such as employee
turnover rate, productivity, financial and perceptual measure of organizational perfor-
mance (Snape and Redman 2010). More recent work has turned to the effects of
HPWS practices on individual employee attitudes and behaviors (Allen, Shore and
Griffeth 2003; Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Kuvaas 2008; Snape and Redman 2010).
For example, Allen, Shore and Griffeth (2003) show that a positive relationship exists
between supportive HPWS and organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and
employee retention, and Snape and Redman (2010) find that HPWS practices
positively affect employee attitudes and behaviors, including helping behaviors and
organizational citizenship behaviors.
Studies on HRM practices have also shown a positive relationship between HPWS
practices and a range of employee gains, including positive psychological implications and
increased autonomy (Den Hartog et al. 2013). For instance, Boxall and Macky (2009)
have shown that opportunities in HPWS practices for skill development and employee
participation positively impact job satisfaction. Wood and de Menezes (2011) report that
the consultative elements of HPWS practices contribute to employee well-being and job
satisfaction by enhancing an individual employee’s sense of value, worth, and confidence.
The consultative nature of HPWS fits in well with the Chinese context where everyone
belongs to a big family/company and managers are more likely, and are often encouraged,
to discuss with employees before final decisions are made, and employees are also allowed
to actively participate in the process of everyday operations. Within such an environment,
employees are likely to feel enthusiastic, active, and alert with high energy, full concentra-
tion, and pleasurable engagement, and thus have a positive affective state and high job sat-
isfaction (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988).
In a similar vein, despite the potential negative result of work intensification as dis-
cussed in the previous section, highly involvement human resource practices in HPWS
are less likely to lead the group-oriented Chinese employees to feel guilty, fearful, ner-
vous, or distressed, and thus in a negative affective state (Watson, Clark and Tellegen
1988). This could be simply because collectivistic Chinese employees are expected by
their cultural norms to get more involved in group activities, participate more in group
work, and contribute more to group interests rather than to individual interests (Hof-
stede 2001; Triandis 1995). It is therefore expected that the positive relationship
between HPWS and employee attitudes will apply to the collectivistic context in China
when high involvement HPWS practices are used on Chinese employees, which will
lead to positive mood and high job satisfaction, and at the same time, high involvement
HPWS practices are also likely to reduce negative mood in employees. Therefore, it is
hypothesized that:
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Hypothesis 2a: High-performance work systems will be positively related to employees’ posi-
tive mood.
Hypothesis 2b: High-performance work systems will be positively related to job satisfaction.
Hypothesis 2c: High-performance work systems will be negatively related to employees’ nega-
tive mood.

In addition, since individuals’ mood and attitudes are strongly associated with their
behaviors, it has long been found in the literature on HPWS practices and employee
outcomes that employees’ affective states and attitudes will influence employee behav-
iors such as behavioral commitment and engagement (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013;
Combs et al. 2006). Employee engagement refers to an individual’s involvement with,
satisfaction with, and enthusiam for the work he or she does, which includes physical
engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement (Rich, Lepine and
Crawford 2010). It is expected that the more satisfied employees feel with various
human resource practices in the workplace, the more likely they will be to become
engaged with their work with more energy, enthusiasm, and concentration. Similarly,
employees with positive affective state are also more likely to exert high energy, full
concentration, and pleasurable engagement with their work (Watson, Clark and Telle-
gen 1988), while employees with negative affective state are more likely to feel stressful
and display a variety of aversive mood states including anger, contempt, fear, and ner-
vousness, and thus be more likely to disengage from their work. Therefore, it is
hypothesized that:
Hypothesis 3a: Employees’ job satisfaction will be positively related to their engagement.
Hypothesis 3b: Employees’ positive mood will be positively related to their engagement.
Hypothesis 3c: Employees’ negative mood will be negatively related to their engagement.

Furthermore, an employee’s positive mood reflects the extent to which a person feels
enthusiastic, active, and alert, while negative mood is a general dimension of subjective
distress and unpleasant engagement that subsumes a variety of aversive mood states (Wat-
son, Clark and Tellegen 1988). These two mood factors represent affective states and are
related to corresponding affective trait dimensions in personality, which are more stable
emotional responses to environmental stimuli. Emotional responses can influence indi-
viduals’ perception and cognitive evaluation of their environment (Watson, Clark and
Tellegen 1988). In the context of HPWS studies, employees with positive mood are more
likely to retrieve positive information from their memory systems and perceive positive
information cues, and respond more positively to workplace events and environment,
which thus help create positive evaluation that helps improve their job satisfaction. In
contrast, employees with negative mood are more likely to focus on negative events and
unpleasant incidents, with negative perception of their work and environment, leading to
low job satisfaction (Staw and Cohen-Charash 2005). As a result, it is expected in this
study that:

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Hypothesis 4a: Employees’ positive mood will be positively related to their job satisfaction.
Hypothesis 4b: Employees’ negative mood will be negatively related to their job satisfaction.

The mediating effect of employee attitudes on HPWS practices

A growing body of literature has empirically established a relationship between HPWS
and a variety of organizational outcomes, including organizational performance, pro-
ductivity, employee turnover (Huselid 1995; Jensen, Patel and Messersmith 2013; Jiang et al.
2012), in support of the notion that HPWS are an important contributor to organiza-
tional success. However, there are still concerns about HPWS research on its lack of theor-
etical articulation of what explains the black box phenomenon or how and why a particular
HPWS practice can enhance firm performance (Boselie, Dietz and Boon 2005). Although
research that integrates employee attitudes and behaviors is surprisingly limited, what is
known is that improved organizational performance can only be achieved through employ-
ees who exert greater efforts and more committed behaviors to help the firm succeed. For
example, out of the more than 100 studies on HPWS examined by Boselie, Dietz and Boon
(2005), only 11 used employee survey data to test attitudes and employee behaviors such as
commitment and engagement. Few studies have properly tested the mechanism between
HPWS and employee outcomes at the individual level (Wood and de Menezes 2011).
We argue here that employee mood and job satisfaction mediate the relationship
between HPWS and employee engagement. HPWS can generate organizational per-
formance because HPWS practices enhance employee discretion which in turn flows into
improved attitudes and behaviors at work (Harley 2002). Employee mood states refer to
an individual’s affective states that last relatively long and fluctuate as a function of indi-
vidual experiences and can have an important influence on an individual’s thinking and
acting (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988). Job satisfaction refers to how content an indi-
vidual is with his or her job, and employee engagement refers to an individual’s behaviors
including involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for his or her work (Rich,
Lepine and Crawford 2010). Employee mood states as one type of general affect and job
satisfaction as an evaluative attitude towards one’s job are expected to mediate the impact
of HPWS on employee engagement behaviors because established HPWS practices influ-
ence workplace atmosphere, which changes employee mood and attitudes, with increased
satisfaction and with consequent effect on employee behaviors and engagement, which in
turn feed through to the performance of the work-group and eventually the company
(Edwards and Wright 2001). That is, HPWS practices can improve employees’ mood and
their attitudes/orientation to their work which in turn makes them more productive. Pre-
vious research has also shown that HPWS influence organizational performance and this
relationship is mediated by employee perception and attitudes (Combs et al. 2006). In
other words, HPWS practices help generate employees with positive mood who are more
likely to retrieve positive information from their memory systems and perceive positive
information cues, and respond more positively to workplace events and environment,
such as HPWS practices, which thus form positive evaluation that helps improve their

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Positive mood

H2a (+) H3b (+)

H4a (+)

H2b (+) Job H3a (+) Employee

HPWS satisfaction engagement

H2c (–)
H4b (–)
H3c (–)

H1 (+) Negative mood

Figure 1 The research model on the impact of HPWS on employee engagement [Colour figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

engagement behaviors. Therefore, it is hypothesized that (with the integrated research

model in Figure 1):

Hypothesis 5: Employee mood (employee affective states) and job satisfaction will mediate
the relationship between high-performance work systems and employee engagement.

Methods
Data and sample
The data for this study were collected from four different cities in South China from three
different sectors, including manufacturing, hotel service, and health-care. The sample was
identified through the government bureau in charge of business development. We used
their provided contact list to approach the key HR officers of all the companies on the list.
Once the consent was obtained, senior managers and their HR officers accompanied the
investigators and their assistants to call for volunteer employees to participate in this
study. Questionnaires were distributed by the research assistants to these volunteer par-
ticipants, who were allowed to complete the questionnaires on their own time and then
return the questionnaires in self-addressed envelopes. In order to reduce the common
method bias, we collected the data at two different times: the second wave of data collec-
tion was lagged by two months. We distributed 1000 copies of the questionnaire and a
pseudo ID to each participant for the first wave of data collection which measured
employees’ perceived HPWS practices in their companies, with 864 completed question-
naires being returned. The second wave of data collection was to measure employee mood
and attitudes and the engagement behaviors of those employees who returned the

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questionnaires in the first round, resulting in 782 usable questionnaires after the deletion
of those with missing information or incomplete. The two waves of data collected were
matched based on employees’ assigned pseudo IDs and employees were debriefed on the
purpose and potential implications of the research project after the second wave of data
collection was completed.
Among the 782 employee participants, 66% of them were from service sectors, 42%
from the hotel sector, 24% from the healthcare sector, and 34% were from the manufac-
turing sector, with 57.5% male respondents, and all companies from the public sector.
The age of the participants, by cohort, ranged from 24 years old or younger (15.4%), 25–
34 years (39.7%), 35– 44 years (25.3%), to 45 years or older (19.6%). The average tenure
at current company was 1 to 3 years (27.1%), followed by 1 year or less (26.1%), 3 to
5 years (12%), and 5 years or longer (34.8%). The education level ranged from high
school or below (51.4%), college/vocational school (42.8%), to university or above
(5.8%).

Measures
The measures of perceived HPWS practices, employee’s positive and negative mood, job
satisfaction, employee engagement, and the control variables were included in the
employee questionnaire. All the measures were adopted from widely used standardized
scales often employed in HPWS studies. Questionnaires were administered in Chinese
mandarin, and all the questionnaires were translated into Chinese and back-translated
into English to ensure reliability and equivalency by bilingual colleagues of the authors,
following recommended procedures (Brislin 1976).
High-performance work systems were measured with 10 items adopted from the study
by Den Hartog et al. (2013), with participants responding on a 5-point Likert scale from
1 = ‘strongly disagree’ to 5 = ‘strongly agree’, which covers skills-, motivation-, and
empowerment-enhancing practices including training, development, promotion, per-
formance management, teamwork, autonomy, and job design. Example items include
‘Training is provided to me regularly’, ‘Managers take my career ambitions and goals into
account here’, and ‘I can determine and make changes in the way in which I perform my
work’. We conducted a set of confirmative factor analyses and the results showed an
acceptable fit for the 3-factor structure (v2 = 3.947, p < 0.01, GFI = 0.987, CFI = 0.986,
RMSEA = 0.061). Because of high inter-correlations among these three factors, we then
performed another CFA to test a model including 1 second-order factor representing the
whole set of HPWS practices. This model was found to fit the data significantly better than
the 3-factor model (v2 = 2.042, p < 0.001; GFI = 0.995, CFI = 0.996, RMSEA = 0.037).
Therefore, we combined the full set of HPWS items into three subsystem scores and then
combined these into one aggregate HPWS score. Cronbach’s alpha of this measure was
0.83.
Employee mood and attitudes were assessed through three aspects: employee’s positive
mood, negative mood, and job satisfaction. The overall job satisfaction was measured with
the Michigan Organizational Satisfaction Scale (Cammann et al. 1979), with sample items
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including ‘In general, I am very satisfied with my job’. The Cronbach alpha of this measure
was 0.79. Employee’s positive mood and negative mood were measured using the widely
used PANAS scale (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988) to ask an employee to indicate his
or her affective state in the past two months. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule
(PANAS) comprises two mood scales, one that measures positive mood state and the
other measures negative mood state. Used as a psychometric scale, the PANAS is a widely
accepted scale for assessing employee mood states (Watson, Clark and Tellegen 1988).
Sample items for positive mood include ‘I am interested’ (excited, enthusiastic, proud),
and for negative mood include ‘I am irritable’ (nervous, jittery, afraid), with 1 = ‘strong
disagree’ and 5 = ‘strongly agree’. The Cronbach alphas for these two scales were 0.81 and
0.91, respectively.
Employee engagement refers to an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with,
and enthusiasm for the work he or she does. Employee engagement was measured in this
study using the scale developed by Rich, Lepine and Crawford (2010), which assesses
employee engagement from three aspects, including physical engagement, emotional
engagement, and cognitive engagement. This scale has 18 items, on a 5-point Likert scale
(1 = ‘strong disagree’ and 5 = ‘strongly agree’), with sample items including ‘I work with
intensity on my job’, ‘I am enthusiastic in my job’, and ‘At work, my mind is focused on
my job’. A set of confirmative factor analyses supported a model with 1 second-order fac-
tor representing overall employee engagement (v2 = 2.909, p < 0.001; GFI = 0.981,
CFI = 0.986, RMSEA = 0.049). Similarly, we combined three subscores into one aggre-
gate employee engagement score. Cronbach’s alpha of this measure was 0.86.

Results
The research model and the hypotheses developed were empirically tested using structural
equation modeling (SEM) with the AMOS 17.0 program with age, gender, education level,
tenure in the current company, and industry as control variables. The impact of age, gen-
der, tenure in the current company, and the education level were controlled for in this
study because older employees, female employees, and senior employees are more likely to
show higher level of commitment, while employees with a higher level of education are
more likely to change jobs and thus less committed (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013).
Industry was also included as another control variable in order to control for the impact
of different mobility level of employees in various industrial sectors.
Given that the SEM approach has no single statistical test of significance for model fit,
several goodness-of-fit measures were used to assess the fit of the model. The Chi-square
(v2), the Bentler–Bonett normed fit index (NFI), the comparative fit index (CFI), the
goodness of fit Index (GFI), and the root mean-square error of approximation (RMSEA)
were used as the measures for goodness-of-fit. Among these indexes, NFI and CFI should
exceed 0.90 and a RMSEA should be 0.08 or below to be acceptable.
SEM analysis involves two major steps: the measurement model assessment and the
structural model assessment. Kline (2005) has suggested that SEM researchers should

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always test the full measurement model underlying the full structural model first, and if
the fit of the measurement model is found acceptable, then proceed to the second step of
testing the structural model by examining its various fit indexes. This two-step analysis
was carried out to explore the relationship between HPWS, employee attitudes (including
job satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect), and employee engagement.

Measurement model
To estimate the measurement model with the latent factors as specified, covariance
between each pair of latent variables was allowed, that is, each latent variable with every
other latent variable in the model. The statistical test of this measurement model is equiva-
lent to a confirmatory factor analysis of all study variables. The descriptive statistics are
reported in Table 1, and the output of the robust maximum likelihood analysis on the
full-measurement model provides a robust Chi-square statistic and a set of model fit
indexes, which clearly showed that a 5-factor measurement model (HPWS practices, posi-
tive mood, negative mood, job satisfaction, and employee engagement) fits the data very
well (see Table 2), with v2 = 1218.44; NFI = 0.907; GFI = 0.901; CFI = 0.924;
RMSEA = 0.057, and thus this 5-factor measurement model was used in the testing of the
structure model discussed next.

Structural model
The hypotheses predicted that employee mood and attitude mediate the positive relation-
ship between HPWS and employee engagement. Using the aforementioned measurement
model, a structural model was constructed and tested which incorporated every path
based on all the hypotheses developed for this study. After removing the path of HPWS to
negative mood and negative mood to employee engagement because of their insignifi-
cance, the revised structural model showed a good fit to the data (v2 = 616.208;
GFI = 0.916; CFI = 0.918; NFI = 0.882; RMSEA = 0.065; see Table 3, model 1). In order
to test the mediating effect of employee mood and attitude on the relationship between
HPWS and employee engagement, six other models were built and assessed by adding/
removing different paths to fit the data, and the Akaike information criterion (AIC) was
used for model comparison. The relative size of AIC provides valuable information for
model comparison: for any two models from the same data set, the model with a smaller
AIC is to be preferred. Among all models in Table 3, model 2 has the best fit indexes with
smallest AIC (v2 = 512.922; GFI = 0.930; CFI = 0.928; NFI = 0.902; RMSEA = 0.058;
AIC = 632.923). In this study, model 2 was thus chosen as the final model for hypothesis
testing and analysis. Figure 2 displays the final structural model and estimates of its
parameters. The numbers along the path represent standardized path coefficients.
The SEM results indicate that HPWS are positively related to employees’ job satisfac-
tion and positive mood (b = 0.52, p < 0.001; b = 0.68, p < 0.001, respectively), which
supports hypotheses 2a and 2b, and job satisfaction and positive mood further lead to
high employee engagement (b = 0.39, p < 0.001; b = 0.33, p < 0.001, respectively),
which supports hypotheses 3a and 3b. Furthermore, positive mood is also positively
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Table 1 Means, standard deviations, and correlations of variables
Variables Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1 Gender 1.57 .50 –

2 Age 2.20 .95 .18** –
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3 Tenure 2.72 1.44 .21** .60*** –

4 Education 1.48 .71 .11* . 14* .14* –
5 Industry .54 .50 .00 .07 .22** .42*** –
6 HPWS 3.49 1.06 .16** .23** .34*** .20** .16** (.83)
7 Positive mood 3.39 .87 .11* .12* .17* .07 .04 .44*** (.91)
8 Negative mood 2.38 1.05 .06 .14* .12* .23** .04 .03 .08* (.81)
9 Job satisfaction 3.63 .91 .08* .09* .21** .08* .10* .64*** .46*** .11* (.79)
10 Employee engagement 3.78 .83 .14* .01 .03 .05 .07 .36*** .41*** .03 .41*** (.86)
N = 782. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
Variables were coded as follows: gender: 1 = male, 2 = female; age: 1 = 24 or younger, 2 = 25–34, 3 = 35–44, 4 = 45–54, 5 = 55 or older; tenure:
1 = one year or less, 2 = 1–3 years, 3 = 4–5 years, 4 = 6–8 years, 5 = 8 years or more; education: 1 = high school diploma or lower, 2 = college,
3 = university, 4 = master or above; industry: 0 = service (hotels or health-care), 1 = manufacturing. The bold numbers in brackets along the
diagonal line are Cronbach alphas.

© 2017 Australian Human Resources Institute

 Yufang Huang, Zhenzhong Ma and Yong Meng

Table 2 Assessment of the measurement model on HPWS and employee engagement

Models χ2 df χ2/df Dχ2 RMSEA CFI GFI NFI

1-factor model 7390.08 377 19.60 – .154 .388 .492 .377

(HPWS + PM + NM + JS + EE)
2-factor model 4699.13 371 12.67 2690.95*** .122 .627 .652 .609
(HPWS; PM + NM + JS + EE)
3-factor model 3501.44 367 9.54 1197.69*** .105 .726 .741 .705
(HPWS; PM + NM + JS; EE)
4-factor model 2295.60 357 6.43 1205.84*** .083 .831 .829 .806
(HPWS; PM + NM; JS; EE)
5-factor model 1218.24 345 3.53 1077.36*** .057 .924 .901 .907
(HPWS; PM; NM; JS; EE)
HPWS = high-performance work systems; PM = positive mood; NM = negative mood; JS = job sat-
isfaction; EE = employee engagement.

Table 3 Assessment of the structural models on HPWS and employee engagement

The model tested χ2 df χ2/df RMSEA AIC CFI GFI NFI TLI

Model 1 (Partial mediation) 616.208 154 4.001 .065 728.208 .918 .916 .882 .887
HPWS ? EE
HPWS ? PM ? EE
HPWS ? JS ? EE
HPWS ? PM ? JS ? EE
Model 2 (Full mediation 1) 512.922 155 3.309 .058 632.923 .928 .930 .902 .909
HPWS ? PM ? EE
HPWS ? JS ? EE
HPWS ? PM ? JS ? EE
Model 3 (Full mediation 2) 632.956 156 4.057 .066 740.956 .905 .913 .879 .885
HPWS ? PM ? EE
HPWS ? JS ? EE
Model 4 (No mediation) 667.573 157 4.252 .068 773.573 .899 .910 .872 .877
HPWS ? EE
HPWS ? PM
HPWS ? JS
HPWS = high-performance work systems; PM = positive mood; JS = job satisfaction; EE =
employee engagement; negative mood was removed during the assessment of alternative paths as it
was not found to be significantly related to the criterion variable or the predictor variable. Model 2
(in bold) was the best fit and thus chosen for hypothesis testing and discussions.

related to job satisfaction (b = 0.16, p < 0.01), which supports hypothesis 4a, and nega-
tive mood is negatively related to job satisfaction (b = 0.15, p < 0.01), which supports
hypothesis 4b. The indirect total effects of HPWS on employee engagement are also

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Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 56

Positive mood

.52*** .33***
.16**

Job .39*** Employee

.68***
HPWS satisfaction engagement

–.15**
ns ns

Negative mood

Figure 2 The revised structural model on HPWS and employee engagement [Colour figure can
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

significant (b = 0.46, p < 0.001), which supports hypothesis 1. The SEM results thus sup-
port all our hypotheses except hypotheses 2c and 3c, which predict that HPWS will be
negatively related to employee negative mood and employee negative mood will be nega-
tively related to employee engagement, respectively. In addition, the final revised model
clearly indicates that employee mood and job satisfaction fully mediate the relationship
between HPWS and employee engagement, in support of hypothesis 5. The overall results
thus provide another approach to explain the mechanism by which HPWS influence
employee outcomes and further organizational performance.

Discussion and conclusion

The increasingly globalized world economy has created a strong need to understand dif-
ferent HRM practices across the globe, in particular on how to manage employees from
eastern cultures. This study began with the fact that tremendous intercultural differences
across the globe had made it essential for a better understanding of HRM practices in dif-
ferent national settings. HPWS in an international context – in particular about Chinese
culture and its impact on employees’ response to HPWS practices – deserved greater
research effort. This study used data from different sectors in China to explore the impact
of HPWS on employee mood and job satisfaction, and on employee engagement in the
Chinese cultural context. The results of this study provide empirical support for previous
research findings and evidence for the universalistic impact of HPWS practices on
employee behaviors. The findings will enrich our knowledge of HPWS practices as well as
human resources management in general in a global context, thus advancing con-
temporary HRM and employee engagement studies.

354 © 2017 Australian Human Resources Institute

 Yufang Huang, Zhenzhong Ma and Yong Meng

This study has important implications for both theory and practice. In theory, the
findings of this study are very similar to the ones found in the West, which provides
empirical evidence for the universalistic impact of HPWS. This is an important addi-
tion to the literature, in particular when more multinationals are expanding into
emerging markets where contemporary management practices have yet to be validated
in order to improve their competitiveness. HRM theories developed in the West are
often subject to criticism in that they are not sufficiently contextualized and thus may
not be generalizable to other cultural contexts. This study seems to support a set of
universally accepted management practices, at least in the HPWS practices that may be
common across cultures. More studies are called for to validate the effectiveness of
HPWS in other cultural contexts (Bal, Dorien and De Jong 2013; Harley 2002; Jiang
et al. 2012).
In addition, while it has been argued that HPWS practices could provide employees
with more discretion and support in exchange for more employee compliances and cre-
ative capability as well as engaged behaviors, it has also been argued that HPWS practices
could lead to work intensification (Ramsay, Scholarios and Harley 2000) and HPWS prac-
tices may create competitive advantage for organizations at the expense of employees’
well-being (Danford et al. 2008). Employees subject to HPWS practices may also suffer a
higher level of stress as a result of the added responsibility associated with enhanced dis-
cretion, insecurity, and job anxiety (Danford et al. 2008; Jensen, Patel and Messersmith
2013; Ramsay, Scholarios and Harley 2000). However, despite such a debate, this study
seems to provide indirect support for the positive effect of HPWS practices in that HPWS
practices in the Chinese context will not lead to employees’ negative mood, which is often
associated with the high pressure and job anxiety resulting from work intensification. Our
findings may indicate that researchers need to re-examine the notion about the negative
impact of HPWS, if any, in a collectivistic context where people are often motivated to
work hard for group interests, and thus the often-debated work intensification might not
be an issue in such a context. This could be a new perspective for contemporary research
on HPWS in the global market. Moreover, the findings about the important role of posi-
tive mood in the underlying mediation process help answer the question of how HPWS
affect employee engagement and demystify the black box of how HPWS impact individual
attitudes and behaviors (Ramsay, Scholarios and Harley 2000). The findings of the medi-
ating impact of positive mood states enable us to better understand the mechanism
through which HPWS practices influence workplace atmosphere, and create positive
employee mood and attitudes, which result in increased satisfaction and engaged
employee behaviors, and then feeds through to the performance of the work-group and
eventually the company (Edwards and Wright 2001).
The study also adds value to the literature on HPWS in that it examines the impact of
HPWS on employee attitudes and behaviors at the individual level, thus overcoming the
problems associated with traditional HPWS research which often examines the relation-
ship between high involvement human resource practices and organizational per-
formance at a unit or company level. The question of why and how HPWS affect
© 2017 Australian Human Resources Institute 355
Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 56

employee engagement often remains a black box as it is not very clear how HPWS impact
individual attitudes and behaviors (Ramsay, Scholarios and Harley 2000). Examining
HPWS and their impact on variables at the individual level will contribute to a better
understanding of the mechanism through which HPWS practices create reciprocity
power in the receiving employees so that employees will work harder and longer with
enhanced engagement in return.
This study can have important practical implications as well. First, HRM practitioners
can use the findings to improve their practices and further employee engagement in
China. For example, with China as a newly emerged industrialized economy, many Chi-
nese managers, including human resource managers, are still following the principles of
scientific management theories, and thus are largely ignoring employees’ attitudes or well-
being in motivating Chinese employees. Consequently, they have increasingly constrained
the improvement of work engagement and work performance in China. Recent job-
related protest activities occurred in several manufacturing companies in China and the
low Gallup survey results on employee engagement in China (Yu and Srinivasan 2013)
have indicated that human resource managers in China need to pay more attention to
employees’ feelings and attitudes and other labor relation related factors in order to
achieve sustainable development. HPWS seem to be one viable solution to creating high
employee commitment and better employee relations in the Chinese context.
Second, as an increasingly important emerging market, China has proven to be a
very tough place to apply western management theories due to its complex collectivistic
cultural traditions and strong interpersonal guanxi-oriented practices. Yet the findings
of this study suggest that HPWS practices can improve employees’ positive moods and
increase job satisfaction which leads to engaged employees, similar to what is found in
the West. Considering the nature of HPWS, which is to create the incentive and motiv-
ation for employees to become highly committed and involved, this study points to a
new perspective in exportation of management theories developed in the West to China
and other collectivistic cultures: team or group-based management practices that can
involve employees, together with constant open communication may work well in col-
lectivistic cultures and thus have better generalizability across the globe. Future research
is also called for to explore other cultural aspects in China, such as the impact of guanxi
and the impact of in-group favoritism (Ma 2010; Triandis 1995) on the relationship
between HPWS and employee engagement. International managers can adopt these
practices/theories in practicing management across the global market for more effective
human resources management. Studies can also explore industrial characteristics and
the impact of HPWS as well as the potential interaction impact between HPWS and
firm ownership to help HRM practitioners identify more appropriate human resource
practices.
Caution has to be exercised, however, in applying the findings of this study to other
contexts. While this is a longitudinal study, we did not have a long time period to
measure the same variables, and thus the causal effect of HPWS on employee mood and
attitudes and engagement needs further validation. More studies are required to replicate
356 © 2017 Australian Human Resources Institute
 Yufang Huang, Zhenzhong Ma and Yong Meng

and validate the findings of this study. Yet, this study uses employees as participants – a
strength compared with other HPWS studies that use company reports for information
on employee outcomes – and using employees increases the external validity in generaliz-
ing the findings of this study to other populations, even though the samples used are not
perfectly representative samples, which is an issue often associated with the survey
method. While we collected the data at different times, the common method bias could
still affect the relationship, which should be addressed in future studies. In addition, this
study examines individual employees’ perception of HPWS and behavioral outcomes at
the individual level. The next step in this line of research is to explore the relationship
between HPWS and individual and organizational performance using a multi-level
approach in order to fully capture the essence of HPWS and the associated impact on
performance outcomes.

Acknowledgements
This project was partially funded by a Humanity and Social Sciences Project Foundation
of Chinese Ministry of Education (Grant #10YJA630043), and the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities (Grant #JUSRP21145).

Yufang Huang (PhD, Nanjing University, China) is a full professor in management at the Jiangnan
University, Wuxi, China. Her research interests include employee engagement, knowledge
management, and HPWS.

Zhenzhong Ma (PhD, McGill) is a full professor in management and organization studies at the
University of Windsor, Canada. His research interests include cross-cultural management, Chinese
studies, and conflict management and negotiation. He has published in a range of business and
HRM journals.

Yong Meng (PhD, Senshu University) is an associate professor in management at the School of
Management, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China. His research interests
include Oriental management and cross-cultural studies.

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