Jurnal MG 6 Pengayaan Macky

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The International Journal of Human Resource

Management
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The relationship between ‘high-performance work

practices’ and employee attitudes: an investigation of
additive and interaction effects
Keith Macky & Peter Boxall
Version of record first published: 25 Apr 2007.
To cite this article: Keith Macky & Peter Boxall (2007): The relationship between ‘high-performance work practices’ and
employee attitudes: an investigation of additive and interaction effects, The International Journal of Human Resource
Management, 18:4, 537-567
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Int. J. of Human Resource Management 18:4 April 2007 537– 567
The relationship between ‘high-

performance work practices’ and
employee attitudes: an investigation
of additive and interaction effects
Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 20:42 22 April 2013
Keith Macky and Peter Boxall
Abstract In order to improve our understanding of mediating variables inside the

‘black box’ of the firm’s labour management, this paper examines the relationship between
high-performance work system (HPWS) practices and employee attitudes. Using a
randomly selected, national population sample, clear evidence was found for a positive
relationship between HPWS practices and the attitudinal variables of job satisfaction, trust
in management, and organizational commitment, implying that HPWS can provide win-
win outcomes for employees and employers. However, the study also tests – from an
employee perspective – the ‘complementarities thesis’ and finds negative interaction
effects among HPWS practices. This strengthens the argument that there are likely to be
limits to the positive outcomes of HPWSs for employees. Evidence of sequencing in the
employee attitudinal responses to HPWSs was also found, with job satisfaction as the key
mediating variable.
Keywords High-performance work systems; bundling; strategic HRM; job satisfaction;

trust; commitment.
Introduction
The burgeoning literature on ways in which human resource management might lead to
superior organizational performance includes reference to ‘high-commitment management’
(e.g. Gallie et al., 2001; Wood, 1995; Wood and Albanese, 1995), ‘high-involvement work
practices’ (Guthrie, 2001; Pil and MacDuffie, 1996), and ‘high-performance work systems’
(HPWS) (e.g. Appelbaum et al., 2000; Way, 2002), among others. While there are a number
of theoretical, empirical and practical dimensions on which these constructs differ
(e.g. Bassett, 1993; Guest, 2002; Ramsay et al., 2000; Truss, 2001; Wood, 1999), a common
theme is the notion that the HR practices involved should form a coherent, integrated
‘bundle’; a system of complementarities whose effect is greater than the sum of its parts (e.g.
Appelbaum et al., 2000; Godard, 2004; Guest, 2002; MacDuffie, 1995; Wood, 1999). What
is also common to these models of HR strategy is an assumed, underlying, causal link
flowing from HR practices to organizational performance via the responses of employees
(e.g. Guest, 1999; Ramsay et al., 2000).
Keith Macky, Department of Management, Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag

92006, Auckland, New Zealand (tel: 64 9 921 9999 extn 5035; e-mail: keith.macky@aut.ac.nz);
Peter Boxall, Department of Management & Employment Relations, University of Auckland,
Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand (tel: 64 9 3737999; e-mail: p.boxall@auckland.ac.nz).
The International Journal of Human Resource Management
ISSN 0958-5192 print/ISSN 1466-4399 online q 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09585190601178745
538 The International Journal of Human Resource Management
In this paper, we refer from here on to high-performance work systems (HPWSs)
to cover this family of models of labour management. The purpose of the paper is to
investigate the relationships between commonly cited high-performance work practices
and a cluster of important employee attitudes: job satisfaction, organizational
commitment (affective and behavioural) and trust in management. These are important
proximal links or mediating variables within the ‘black box’ of a firm’s labour
management. The study first aims to examine associations between an index of HPWS
practices and these employee attitudes, as a test for additive relationships. It then looks
for interactions among the practices, thus testing the ‘complementarities thesis’ (Godard,
2004: 352) but from an employee rather than organization level perspective.
The study advances prior HPWS research in three ways. First, we address the impacts
of HPWSs on employees, an area where it is recognized that more research is needed.

Second, we use a heterogeneous but representative national sample of employees with a
view to obviating some of the methodological criticisms of previous studies. And, finally,
we add to the debate on HPWS bundling by directly testing for interaction effects among
high-performance work practices.
Theoretical framework and hypotheses

Bundling and internal fit in high-performance work systems
Bundling, given prominence by MacDuffie’s (1995) study of automobile manufacturing,
relates to one of the central theoretical concerns in strategic HRM – ‘internal fit’ (Baird
and Meshoulam, 1988; Schuler and Jackson, 1987). Internal fit is the idea that once the
outward-looking, business-oriented direction is set for HRM (‘external fit’), HR practices
should be integrated to form a coherent system of practices that are mutually supportive
(Delery, 1998). In other words, the argument is that internal consistency should be
maximized, with both costly duplications and perverse combinations of practices
minimized (Baron and Kreps, 1999; Delery, 1998).
Of course, it may not be quite this simple. Internal consistency in HRM is inevitably
affected by the reality of strategic tensions in organizations – between short-run
productivity and long-run agility, for example, and between the interests of competing
stakeholder groups (Boxall and Purcell, 2003; Dyer and Shafer, 1999; Evans and
Genadry, 1999; Wright and Snell, 1998). This implies that some HR practices will need
to work in different directions or reinforce different themes within a more complex blend
of messages aimed at employees. Nonetheless, the notion of internal fit when bundling
HR practices retains a prominent place in the literature around superior styles of labour
management.
Central to most conceptions of HPWSs, then, is the assumption that there are
complementarities among the relevant HR practices (Delery and Shaw, 2001). It is
generally assumed that any effects of HPWS practices on desired organizational
outcomes must be more than simply the additive sum of each practice’s independent
effects. Instead, the notion of complementariness necessitates that such practices have a
synergistic or mutually reinforcing influence on organizational performance (Appelbaum
et al., 2000; Godard, 2004; Ichniowski et al., 1997; MacDuffie, 1995; Wood, 1999).
Complementariness implies that interaction effects among HPWS practices should
be observable, explaining at least some of the variance in the dependent variables
being studied, in addition to any main effects for individual practices (Cappelli and
Neumark, 2001; Gerhart, 2004; Guest et al., 2004). However, as Delery (1998) observes,
few studies have sought to directly test for such interaction effects. Those that have
are either industry specific (e.g. MacDuffie, 1995), and are therefore limited by
Macky and Boxall: HPWS and employee attitudes 539
contextually-specific industry characteristics (Datta et al., 2005), or have well-
documented methodological weaknesses (discussed below under ‘Method’). There is
also contrary evidence. Cappelli and Neumark (2001), for example, fail to find significant
interaction effects, with the possible exception of a synergy for profit-sharing with self-
managed teams, while Godard (2001) finds a plateau effect in HPWS adoption. In the
latter case, Canadian firms with low to moderate HPWS adoption gained the most
compared to those with high adoption levels, suggesting a case of ‘diminishing returns at
higher levels of adoption, rather than the increasing returns predicted by the
complementarities thesis’ (Godard, 2004: 354). Guest et al. (2004) also found little
evidence for meaningful interaction terms between HR practices in relation to the
organizational outcomes of performance, innovation, employment relations and labour
turnover. At the employee level of analysis, Appelbaum et al. (2000: 127) also found no
evidence for interaction effects on employee attitudes and concluded that ‘although
theory suggests that system effects are likely to be important in the analysis of plant
performance, there is no basis for this expectation in the analysis of worker outcomes’.
There is clearly a need for further research into the existence, or otherwise, of
synergistic interaction effects among the HR practices involved in an HPWS.
The mediating role of employee responses

In addition to complementarities, the literature on HPWSs also assumes a causal link
flowing from bundled HR practices to organizational performance via the responses of
employees. HPWSs are envisaged to work by changing employee behaviour in ways that
add value to the critical organizational processes that deliver the goods and services
that customers want. However, while employees may be placed as central to mediating
the impact HPWSs have on organizational performance, their reactions to such practices
have been rather neglected in the HPWS research to date (Grant and Shields, 2002;
Guest, 1999, 2002; Ramsay et al., 2000).
The basic theory of performance being assumed in HPWS research, either implicitly
or explicitly (e.g. Appelbaum et al., 2000; MacDuffie, 1995), is what Boxall and Purcell
(2003) describe as ‘AMO theory’ (see also Gerhart, 2004) and which others
have previously referred to as ‘the performance equation’ (e.g. Bailey et al., 1986).
In brief, the theory is that HPWS practices contribute to improvements in employee
performance and thence to organizational performance by three interrelated,
causal routes (Cooke, 2001): (a) by developing employee skills and abilities (i.e. their
‘capability’ for performance); (b) by increasing an employee’s motivation for
discretionary effort; and c) by providing employees with the opportunity to make
full use of their knowledge, skills and other attributes in their jobs (see Guest (1997) for
a variant of this approach).
Within this framework, employee capability sets the upper limit of performance,
motivation influences the degree to which this capability is turned into action, and
opportunity refers to enhancing avenues for the capability of motivated employees to be
expressed and/or to the removal of barriers that may prevent otherwise motivated
workers from utilizing their capacity for labour. The role of HR practices, then, is to
help a firm attract and develop employee capability (e.g. through selective hiring,
developmental performance appraisals, and comprehensive training). HR practices may
also elicit organizationally desirable behaviour by providing both the opportunity and
motivation for discretionary effort. This includes HR practices that seek directly
to modify performance behaviour, such as pay-for-performance, as well as high-
involvement practices that seek to motivate by providing employees with an opportunity
to exercise voice and influence over their work (Lawler et al., 1998). Examples of such
high-involvement practices include the use of flat, team-based organizational structures,
quality improvement or problem-solving groups that allow individual workers some
degree of autonomy in determining their work methods and priorities, and strategies for
enabling better communication among employees and with management (e.g. by
reducing status differentials). Such practices may also serve as a vehicle for identifying
and removing barriers to employee performance.
Many of the HR practices mentioned here may also aid employee retention by
building commitment to their employing organizations, thereby retaining human capital
as well as improving productivity by reducing dysfunctional employee turnover
(McElroy et al., 2001; Shaw et al., 2005). Further examples of such high-commitment
practices include the use of internal recruitment, merit-based promotions, providing

career progression and development opportunities for employees, and the offer of
ongoing job security (e.g. Arthur, 1994).
From this discussion, there seems a clear theoretical basis for presupposing that HR
practices included under the HPWS rubric can serve to modify employee behaviour,
and the context within which that behaviour occurs, in ways that enhance employee
performance. What remains less clear from these literatures is the role that
employee work attitudes play in mediating the relationship between high-performance
work systems and desired organizational outcomes. These attitudes are potentially
important proximal links or mediating variables within the ‘black box’ of a firm’s labour
management and are contextualized below within an HPWS framework.
Job satisfaction, employee commitment and trust in management

The research on these constructs is large indeed, and it is not the purpose of this paper to
attempt to review these literatures. Suffice to say that there is ample evidence
that employee job satisfaction is consistently and negatively associated with voluntary
employee turnover (e.g. Harter et al., 2002), with job dissatisfaction being antecedent to
forming intentions to quit (Griffeth et al., 2000) and other withdrawal cognitions
(Hom and Griffeth, 1991). An employee’s stated intention to leave, the flip side of
behavioural commitment as an intention to remain, is one of the strongest and most
consistently found predictors of actual quit behaviour (Griffeth et al., 2000). Prior
research has also consistently shown a strong positive relationship between job
satisfaction and employee commitment to their organizations (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990),
although the causal nature of this relationship is not entirely understood with some
studies suggesting satisfaction determines commitment (e.g. Lance, 1991; Mathieu,
1991) and others the reverse (e.g. Vandenberg and Lance, 1992).
There is also a growing body of evidence that points to the role that having satisfied
employees plays in generating satisfied customers (e.g. Rogg et al., 2001; Schmit and
Allscheid, 1995). Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal to a firm, generate more
repeat business for the firm, spend more per sale, and refer other customers to the firm
(Heskett et al., 1997).
There is also evidence that both job satisfaction and employee commitment are
positively associated with measures of organizational performance (e.g. Harter et al.,
2002; Meyer et al., 2001; Ostroff, 1992). At the employee level, a recent meta-analysis
addressing the limitations of the prior research estimates the overall correlation between
satisfaction and individual job performance at 0.30 (Judge et al., 2001). Commitment has
also been positively associated with job performance (Wright and Bonett, 2002). As
Appelbaum et al. (2000) comment, committed workers not only identify psychologically
with their employer and feel stronger attachment to the organization, they are also more
likely to expend discretionary effort towards achieving organizational ends. Employees
who are committed to their organizations can also be expected to show less counter-
productive behaviour than those less committed, while also engaging in a greater amount
of positive extra-role behaviour and better quality in-role behaviour (Wright et al. 2003).
It seems reasonable, then, to posit that HPWSs might serve to improve
organizational performance via improving both employee job satisfaction
and organizational commitment. However, while there is ample micro-HR and I/O
psychology research addressing the relationship between individual HR practices and
employee level outcomes (e.g. Wright and Boswell, 2002), the research evidence for
bundles or clusters of such practices is more limited. For example, Appelbaum et al.
(2000), in their important study of three manufacturing sectors, found that HPWS
practices associated with providing employees with opportunities to participate in
decisions led to increased organizational commitment for steel and medical electronics’
workers, and that this relationship was due to increased trust in management and
intrinsic rewards. No such relationship was found for apparel workers in their study. In a
study of 3,570 participants in 49 organizations, Vandenberg et al. (1999) found that
high-involvement work practices had both a direct positive influence on voluntary
employee turnover and organizational return on equity, and an indirect one via
improved employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using an index of
high-commitment HR practices, Guest (1999) found that employees who reported
experiencing higher numbers of these practices reported higher job satisfaction.
Similarly, Wright et al. (2003) found that higher scores on an index of HR practices were
correlated with higher employee organizational commitment. Finally, drawing on social
exchange theory, Whitener (2001) used cross-level hierarchical linear modelling to
show that employee commitment and trust in management were stronger when
employees believed their managers were more supportive and committed to them. In
part, these perceptions were influenced by the HR practices used by firms, thereby
suggesting that HR practices can shape employee attitudes. Trust in management was
also found to partially mediate the observed relationship between perceived
organizational support and an employee’s commitment to their organization.
The work of Whitener (2001) and Appelbaum et al. (2000) suggest that trust in
management may have an important mediating role between the employee experience of
labour management practices associated with HPWSs and other attitudinal responses to
these practices. Appelbaum et al. (2000), for example, found that HPWSs enhanced
employees’ trust in managers for all three industries they studied, and that this largely
explained the effects that participation opportunities resulting from implementing HPWSs
had on organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Studying the relationship between
high-performance work systems and occupational safety, Zacharatos et al. (2005) found
that trust in management mediated the relationship. Other studies outside the HPWS
framework have also shown that the level of trust workers show in their management is
consistently and positively correlated with organizational commitment (e.g. Gopinath and
Becker, 2000; Pearce, 1993), as well as with job satisfaction (e.g. Cunningham and
MacGregor, 2000).
While the concept lacks a universally accepted definition, there is broad agreement that
trust is a psychological state with both affective and motivational components, and that it is
important for efficient organizational performance (Kramer, 1999). Trust in management
involves a reification – a personalization of a collective identity (management) based on
an employee’s observations of the behaviour of individual managers (Whitener, 2001).
As an affective psychological state, ‘trust in management’, or its lack, can be seen as
developing from people’s experiences over time regarding how they have been treated or
have seen others treated by managers (Whitener et al., 1998). It ‘entails a state of perceived
vulnerability or risk that is derived from individuals’ uncertainty regarding the motives,
intentions, and prospective actions of others on whom they depend’ (Kramer, 1999: 571).
Trust develops, then, when the actions of others are expected to be beneficial or at least not
harmful to one’s own interests (Robinson, 1996). As Whitener (2001) observes, trust in
management reflects the belief that managers are competent and that their actions
in seeking to attain organizational goals will ultimately prove beneficial to employees.
The trustworthiness of managers therefore comprises three factors: their perceived
ability, benevolence and integrity (Mayer and Davis, 1999; Mayer et al., 1995).
Management’s adoption of high-performance work practices should lead to increased
trust to the extent that such actions are seen by employees as demonstrating managerial
competence, reduce their perceptions of vulnerability or threat, and are otherwise seen to
be in the worker’s interests. Findings from Guest’s (1999) study are consistent with such
propositions. He shows that greater use of high-commitment HR practices is associated
with higher levels of perceived fairness in how employees are treated, stronger beliefs
that management delivers on promises, stronger feelings of job security, and higher
levels of trust in management. Brockner and Siegel (1996) also observe that
organizational policies perceived by employees as procedurally and structurally fair
increase trust, while the lack of such perceived fairness reduces trust. It could therefore
be theorized that HPWS practices act to improve employee trust in their management
which, in turn, influences employee commitment to their organization.
Hypotheses
On the basis of the discussion above, we generated a number of hypotheses. The first four
address the additive argument that the more HPWS practices employees experience, the
more positive are employee outcomes in terms of improved levels of job satisfaction,
organizational commitment (affective and behavioural), and trust in management.
Additivity implies a positive linear association: in other words, the more of these
practices the better, as argued by Guest (1999, 2002).
Hypothesis 1: Employee scores on a HPWS index will be positively and significantly

correlated with job satisfaction.
correlated with affective commitment, with employees experiencing
more high-performance work practices also reporting stronger
psychological identification and involvement with their employing
organizations.
associated with behavioural commitment, with employees experiencing
more high-performance practices also reporting stronger intentions to
remain with their employer.
associated with trust in management.
We then generated two hypotheses concerned with mediation. In other words, as

suggested in our literature review, while the work attitudes of trust, satisfaction and
commitment can be seen as influenced by HPWSs, there may be sequencing issues
involved. The fifth hypothesis asserts that trust in management plays a mediating role
between HPWS practices and affective commitment. The sixth posits that the
relationship between HPWS practices and behavioural commitment is partially mediated
by the other three attitudes: job satisfaction, trust in management and affective
commitment.
Hypothesis 5: Trust in management will partially mediate any observed relation-

ship between HPWS index scores and affective commitment.
Hypothesis 6: Job satisfaction, trust in management and affective commitment will
partially mediate any observed relationship between HPWS index
scores and behavioural commitment.
Finally, we generated a seventh hypothesis designed to test the ‘complementarities

thesis’ (e.g. Godard, 2004): the idea that we will find interactive, and not simply additive,
effects of HPWS practices on employee attitudes.
Hypothesis 7: In addition to any linear main effects observed for individual HPWS
practices on job satisfaction, organizational commitment and trust in
management, significant interaction terms will also be found.
Method
Procedure and rationale
The research design for this study involved a cross-sectional, self-completion postal
questionnaire administered to a national sample of employees, and with either a single
independent variable (a HPWS index score) or responses to individual HR practice items
being used to predict scale scores for four dependent variables: job satisfaction, trust in
management, affective (attitudinal) commitment and behavioural commitment (intent to
stay).
Several methodological criticisms have been levelled at the research pertaining to
HPWSs that the present study sought to address (e.g. Gerhart, 2004). Of particular note
has been the tendency to rely upon a single managerial-level informant from
participating organizations when identifying what HR practices are used in any given
firm. This leads to potential problems with measurement error and ignores the possibility
that what managers say is done in their firms might not bear any relationship to what
actually occurs (Gerhart et al., 2000; Purcell, 1999). As Ramsay et al. (2000) note, it is
simply not possible to know from such research whether all employees experience the
HR practices being studied in the same way, or even at all. It is possible, if not probable,
that employees will have different perceptions of the nature and extent of the HR
practices used.
Employee-level HPWS research can also be criticized for using samples that tend to
be industry and/or occupationally specific, or which use the employees of single firms as
their primary informants (Godard, 2004). This raises the obvious problem of
generalizability and may account, in part, for inconsistencies in the findings across
individual studies. Furthermore, where employee population surveys have been used,
these tend to be secondary analyses of archival data originally collected for purposes
other than to test hypotheses related to HPWSs. Examples here include the UK 1998
Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS 98) (e.g. Ramsay et al., 2000), the 1995
Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (Harley, 2002), and Guest’s (1999)
use of an annual telephone survey conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development in the UK. The identification of HR practices for inclusion in such analyses
is obviously dependent on what was measured for the original purposes of such surveys.
The present study, therefore, sought to extend prior research by deliberately using a
heterogeneous national sample of employees to inform on their experiences of HR
practices normatively included under the HPWS rubric.
Participants
The research population comprised all registered urban electors of working age in New
Zealand who were neither self-employed, members of the clergy, in the armed forces, nor
a beneficiary of the state, from which a random sample of 2,000 people was then selected.
Of these, 120 questionnaires were returned as either undeliverable or from people to
whom the questionnaire was not applicable, mainly because they had retired, were
unemployed or were too ill to complete the survey. This reduced the valid survey sample
to 1,880, from which a total of 424 questionnaires were returned with varying degrees of
completion. This gave a response rate of 22.6 per cent: disappointing but better than that
obtained in other published HPWS research (e.g. Datta et al., 2005; Huselid, 1995).
Comparing the respondents with the expected population values shows no significant
differences for gender (x2 (1) ¼ 1.02, p ¼ 0.31), ethnicity (x2 (2) ¼ 0.99, p ¼ 0.61) or
with regard to when the participants were born (x2 (9) ¼ 3.98, p ¼ 0.91). In these terms,
the respondent sample appears to be broadly representative of the population from which
it was drawn.
Exactly 50 per cent of the respondents were female, 22 per cent were of non-European
ethnicity, and the average age at their last birthday was 41.49 years (Table 1), with a range
from 18 to 69 years. The respondents had worked for their current employer for a median
of 4.6 years (range ¼ 0.08–45 years) (the log of this tenure variable is used in the analyses
that follow). The median size of the organizations the respondents worked for was 100,
with a range from 2 to 12,000 employees (the log of this variable is also used in the
analyses that follow). Most of the respondents were permanent employees, either
employed full-time (68.8 per cent) or part-time (14.8 per cent). The balance were employed
on temporary or fixed-term contracts, either full-time (13.6 per cent) or part-time (2.9 per
cent). Over half were employed in a privately owned company or firm (51.7 per cent), 13.4
per cent worked for a company listed on the stock exchange, 13.7 per cent worked for a
foreign multinational, and the remainder in the public sector.
Measures
High-performance work system index The usual strategy employed by HPWS
researchers (e.g. Bailey et al., 2001; Guest, 1999) has been to combine either single or
multi-item measures of individual HR practices into a unitary measure representing an
entire high-performance work system (Delery and Shaw, 2001). Becker and Huselid
(1998) have argued that it is theoretically appropriate to measure high-performance work
systems in this way. Delery (1998), however, makes an important distinction between the
use of a scale and an index when measuring HPWSs, with the latter measuring the level
of the construct while the former assumes that the items included in the scale all measure
the same underlying construct. For a scale, multiple items should, therefore, be used to
improve the measurement reliability and items should have high intercorrelations, as
indicated by statistical techniques such as factor analysis and correlation-based reliability
statistics. However, a HPWS index requires no assumption of an underlying causal
relationship between items. Items would not necessarily need to be highly intercorrelated
(see also Wright and Boswell, 2002) and the use of internal reliability statistics, such as
Cronbach’s coefficient alpha, would not be appropriate for an index (Delery, 1998).
Indeed, Delery’s discussion (see also Delery and Shaw, 2001 and Guest et al., 2004)
Table 1 Descriptive statistics and Pearson’s correlations between all variables
Variable Mean (SD) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 HPWS index z-score 2 0.06 (8.75)
2 Job satisfaction 5.10 (1.14) .72*** (.92)
3 Trust-in-management 4.78 (1.47) .62*** .77*** (.91)
Macky and Boxall: HPWS and employee attitudes

4 OCQ-9 Affective 4.79 (1.31) .61*** .73*** .69*** (.91)
commitment
5 OCQ6 Behavioural 4.58 (1.31) .59*** .65*** .62*** .65*** (.77)
commitment
6 Log years tenure 1.33 (1.27) .06 .01 2.10 2.02 .09 2
7 Age 41.49 (11.82) 2 .19*** 2.10 2.05 2.02 2.01 .36*** 2
8 Gender: Male (0) n/a .01 .07 .08 .05 2.00 2 .12* 2 .07 2
Female (1)
9 Permanent (1) n/a .03 .03 2.01 2.00 .09 .15** 2 .02 .13* 2
Temporary (0)
10 Full-time (1) n/a .10 2.00 2.04 2.02 .06 .21*** 2 .03 2 .23*** 2 .03 2
Part-time (0)
11 Log organization size 4.78 (2.30) .27*** 2.02 2.11* 2.06 .12* .22*** 2 .03 2 .04 2 .03 .21***
Notes: Cronbach coefficient alphas are in parentheses on the diagonal. * ¼ p , .05 ** ¼ p , .01 *** ¼ p , .001 All significance levels are 2-tailed except for those for the HPWS
index z-score with the work attitude variables, which are 1-tailed. N ¼ 368
545
points to the need to test for collinearity between items to identify substitutable HR
practices or items whose inclusion in an additive index would be redundant, and lead to
overestimating the degree of association between the HPWS and the outcome variable
being measured.
In selecting which HR practices to include in such an index, the approach followed by
most researchers has been to derive the practices from prior research (Becker and
Huselid, 1998). The present study does not depart from this strategy, although there is
disagreement among researchers as to which practices should go to make up such
systems (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Delery, 1998). Because the lists of the practices that
ought to be included in a HPWS bundle overlap imperfectly (Guest et al., 2004; Ramsay
et al., 2000; Wood, 1999), the approach used here is a normative one, only including HR
practices commonly referred to in the literature. These practices, as well as example

citations and the items used in the present study to measure the practice, are shown in
Table 2.
No attempt was made, however, to measure the HR practice of ‘selective hiring’, on
the principle that employees might not necessarily be the best informants on such a
practice (Guest, 1999). Also omitted, because of an anticipated lack of variance, was the
use of grievance procedures. For the research population in question, all employers are
required by law to have personal grievance procedures that any employee can access.
In the case of job analysis, the presence of an accurate formal job description was used as
a proxy measure. The practices that are shown in Table 2, and the items used to tap them,
are most obviously related to the motivational and opportunity elements in AMO theory.
However, they do incorporate certain aspects of the ability dimension (training provision
and performance feedback).
Based on this list of items shown in Table 2, a 16-item high performance work system
index was developed. Consistent with Delery’s (1998) argument that the level of analysis
at which a bundle of HR practices is measured should be determined by the outcome
being measured, in the present study practices were measured by employee self-report.
While the practices used here may exist objectively, they are perceived and reacted to
subjectively by individual employees. Therefore, while four items of a more factual
nature had a Yes/No response format (coded 1 and 0 respectively), the balance of 12 items
were perceptual (a matter of degree) and therefore had a 7-point, Likert-type response
format bounded from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Following the
procedure used by other studies incorporating variables with differing response formats
(e.g. Appelbaum et al., 2000; Pil and MacDuffie, 1996), z-scores were calculated for
each item. An examination of the correlation matrix for all 16 items showed the mean
inter-item correlation to be .254 (range ¼ 2 .057 to .642). The highest correlation was
between ‘receiving regular and constructive feedback’ and ‘perceiving performance
appraisals to be fair and accurate’ (r (416) ¼ .642; p ¼ .000). The strength of this
correlation falls well short of indicating collinearity and, therefore, item redundancy
(Delery, 1998). Responses to all 16 items were, therefore, summed to produce an
additive high-performance z-score index for use in testing hypotheses 1 to 6. A visual
examination of the normal probability plot and frequency histogram shows this variable
to be normally distributed.
Job satisfaction This variable was measured using a 16-item scale, containing both
extrinsic and intrinsic job components, originally developed by Warr et al., (1979).
The measure was chosen for its relative brevity compared to other multi-item job
satisfaction instruments. The original instrument was modified to include an additional
item measuring satisfaction with ‘the involvement you have in decisions that affect you’.
Table 2 HPWS HR practices, example citations and measures
HR practice domain Example citations Measurement items
Performance-based pay Guthrie (2001); Pil and MacDuffie (1996); Does your employer have a profit sharing or share
Huselid (1995); Wood (1996); Snell and ownership scheme that you are able to participate
Dean (1992); Guest (1999); Appelbaum in? Have you received additional pay or a pay rise in
et al. (2000); Wright et al. (2003) the past year as a result of your job performance or
work in a team?
Teams as the fundamental Guthrie (2001); Pil and MacDuffie (1996); My work requires me to work closely with other members
unit of organizational structure Wood (1996); Appelbaum et al. (2000) of a team to achieve a common goal or results target.
Participation in some form Guthrie (2001); Huselid (1995); Pil and Employees here have the opportunity to be involved in
of employee participation MacDuffie (1996); Wood (1996); the decision-making on things that matter. For example,

programme Guest (1999); Wright et al. (2003) through quality circles, business process project teams,
or total quality management
Reduced status differentials Pil and MacDuffie (1996); Wood (1996); There are few status differences in my organization between
between managers and other Guest (1999) managers and the rest of the employees. We are all on
employees the same level.
Internal promotion or selection to Guthrie (2001); Huselid (1995); Guest (1999) When jobs become vacant, management normally first tries
fill vacant positions to fill them with people from inside the organization
rather than by recruiting from outside.
Formal performance appraisal systems Huselid (1995); Wood (1996); Truss (2001); Has your job performance been formally appraised by your
Wright et al. (2003) manager or supervisor within the past 12 months?
Appraisals of my performance are fair and accurate.
Developmental appraisal Whitener (2001); Snell and Dean (1992) I receive regular and constructive feedback on how well
I do my job.
Formal communication programmes Guthrie (2001); Huselid (1995); Guest (1999) Management keeps me well informed about the firm and
to keep employees informed about how well it is doing.
their firm
Regular use of employee attitude surveys Guthrie (2001); Huselid (1995); Have you taken part in an employee attitude survey carried
Guest (1999) out by your employer in the past two years?
Employee job security policies, such as Wood (1996); Guest (1999); Becker My employer has a formal policy of avoiding compulsory
no compulsory redundancies and Huselid (1998) redundancies.
547
Table 2 (Continued)
HR practice domain Example citations Measurement items

Formal training as an indicator of an Huselid (1995); Snell and Dean (1992); My employer provides me with sufficient opportunities for
employer’s commitment to invest Truss (2001); Wright et al. (2003) training and development.
in human capital
Formal grievance or complaint Becker and Huselid (1998); Huselid (1995); NA
resolution systems Guest (1999)
Targeted selection Truss (2001); Huselid (1995); NA
Wright et al. (2003)
Merit-based promotion Guthrie (2001) I have good opportunities to advance my career by getting
promoted. The promotion process used here is fair for all
employees.
Formal job analysis Huselid (1995) I have a job description that accurately describes the work I do.
The purpose of this additional item was to provide a more complete job satisfaction
measure by tapping an otherwise absent employee empowerment/participation
dimension. Responses to all items were obtained on a 7-point Likert scale ranging
from very dissatisfied (1) to very satisfied (7). Coefficient alpha for a scale combining all
items indicated sound reliability (alpha ¼ 0.93). A job satisfaction scale score was,
therefore, obtained by calculating the average of the responses to all 16 items, with
higher scores indicating higher satisfaction with the job.
Trust in management This construct was measured using Cook and Wall’s (1980) six-
item scale (see also Clegg and Wall, 1981). In brief, this measures the employee’s degree
of faith in the intentions of their managers and confidence in these managers’ abilities.
Responses were obtained on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to
strongly agree (7), with two negatively worded items reverse scored. An overall trust-in-
management score was obtained by calculating the average of the responses to the six
individual items, with higher scores indicating higher trust in management. Coefficient
alpha for the scale was 0.91.
Organizational commitment This was measured using the 15-item version of the
Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) (Mowday et al., 1979; Mowday
et al., 1982). The OCQ measures an employee’s affective reactions to their employing
organization, rather than to a job per se, and was chosen as it remains one of the most
commonly used in organizational research (Griffeth et al., 2000). Responses were
obtained on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly
agree (7).
Multiple studies have identified a clear two-factor structure to the OCQ, comprising
the nine positively worded and the six negatively worded items respectively
(e.g. Tetrick and Farkas, 1988; White et al., 1995). The latter represent behavioural
commitment in the form of an intention to remain with the organization (Bozeman and
Perrewe, 2001). The nine positively worded items are usually interpreted as measuring
affective or attitudinal commitment (e.g. Iverson and Buttigieg, 1999). A behavioural
commitment scale score was, therefore, computed comprising the average response to
the six negatively worded items. Consistent with the original development of the
OCQ, these items were reverse scored before computing the scale score, thus higher
scores indicate a stronger intention to remain with the employing organization.
Similarly, a score for the nine-item OCQ (affective commitment) was computed as
the average of the responses to all items such that higher scores indicate higher
levels of affective commitment. Coefficient alpha shows the affective commitment
(alpha ¼ 0.92) and behavioural commitment (alpha ¼ 0.77) scales to have
satisfactory reliability.
Control variables The participant variables of age, gender (1 ¼ female, 0 ¼ male),

and tenure with current employer were analysed for possible statistical control. Prior
research shows such variables to be associated with at least some of the criterion
variables included in this study (e.g. Finegold et al., 2002; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990;
Shore et al., 2003; Wright and Bonett, 2002), although there appears to be inconsistency
in the research regarding age and gender (e.g. Allen and Meyer, 1993; Aven et al., 1993).
Firm size, in terms of number of employees, was also included as it has previously been
found to predict both job satisfaction (Beer, 1964) and commitment (MacDermid et al.,
2001; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990). Larger firms are also more likely to adopt more
sophisticated HR systems (Guthrie, 2001). The respondent’s employment status in terms
of whether they were employed full-time or part-time (coded 1 and 0 respectively), or
permanent or temporary employees (coded 1 and 0 respectively), was included as a
control variable on the possibility that part-time and/or temporary employees might not
receive a similar exposure to HR practices associated with HPWSs compared to full-time
and/or permanent employees (e.g. Lepak and Snell, 1999; Purcell, 1999).
Results
Tests of the additive hypotheses
Relevant descriptive statistics for, and intercorrelations between, the control and scale
variables are shown in Table 1. Examination of the frequency histograms for the
attitudinal variables reveals all approximate a normal distribution, although slightly
skewed towards reporting higher job satisfaction, trust in one’s managers, and affective
commitment. The distributions for behavioural commitment and respondent age conform
to the normal. Taking the natural log of organizational size and tenure also successfully
transforms these otherwise seriously skewed distributions to more closely approximate
the normal.
Table 1 shows that few of the work attitude variables are associated with any of the
control variables. A significant but weak correlation was found between organizational
size and employee trust in management and behavioural commitment. Employees in
larger firms are slightly more likely to report lower levels of trust in their managers and
stronger intentions to remain. Employees in larger firms are also more likely to report
experiencing more high-performance work practices, while older workers report
fewer. The magnitude and non-significance of the correlations for the remaining
control variables indicates that they explain little or none of the variance in the
attitudinal variables of interest here.
A statistically significant and strong positive relationship was found between the job
satisfaction and the HPWS z-score (Table 1), lending support to Hypothesis 1. Both
commitment variables were also found to be positively and moderately strongly
correlated with scores on the HPWS index, providing support for Hypotheses 2 and 3.
The degree of trust employees report in their managers was found to be positively and
moderately strongly associated with their experiences of high-performance work
practices. This finding provides support for Hypotheses 4.
However, all four work attitude variables were also found to be correlated with each
other in varying degrees, the strongest being between job satisfaction and trust in
management (r (367) ¼ .766, p ¼ .000), and the weakest between behavioural
commitment and trust in management (r (367) ¼ .623, p ¼ .000). These associations
possibly confound the observed simple relationships between HPWS scores and each
work attitude variable. For this reason, multivariate analyses of covariance
(MANCOVA) were also performed to test Hypotheses 1 to 4.
MANCOVA was used as it has the advantage of reducing Type I error inflation for
studies with multiple dependent variables (Cronk, 2002) and, as Stevens (2002: 262)
observes, ‘deviation from multivariate normality has only a small effect on Type I error’
in MANCOVA. Multivariate normality is unlikely without univariate normality and, as
noted above, many of the work attitude variables were slightly skewed in their
distributions. Hair et al. (1998) also note that the F-test in ANOVA is robust to breaches
of normality for larger sample sizes, particularly where the breach is due to skewness,
while Coakes and Steed (2003) observe that the ANOVA assumptions of normality and
equal variances are of little concern when cell size is greater than 30. Indeed, the F-test
is likely to be conservative in this situation (Stone, 1988), thereby reducing the likelihood
of a Type I error (Levine and Dunlap, 1982, 1983).
This said, to control for possible Type I error inflation and reduced statistical power
arising from including unnecessary control variables, a two-step process was used to test the
hypotheses. First, multivariate tests were performed including all variables to identify non-
significant control variables. The multivariate Pillai’s trace statistic was used here as it ‘is
considered to have acceptable power and to be the most robust statistic against violations of
assumptions’ (Coakes and Steed, 2003: 182). This resulted in gender (trace (4, 353) ¼ 1.40,
p ¼ .234), permanent–temporary employment status (trace (4, 353) ¼ 0.57, p ¼ .687), and
full-time–part-time employment status (trace (4, 353) ¼ 0.25, p ¼ .913) being dropped
from further analysis. The MANCOVA was then repeated leaving out these variables. The
multivariate tests for all the remaining predictor variables were statistically significant: log
organizational size (trace (4, 364) ¼ 17.77, p ¼ .000), age (trace (4, 364) ¼ 3.77,
p ¼ .005), log years tenure (trace (4, 364) ¼ 3.97, p ¼ .004), and HPWS index z-score
(trace (4, 364) ¼ 140.61, p ¼ .000). Comparing the values of these trace statistics clearly
shows the HPWS variable to be the most important contributor to the model. Table 3 shows
the findings for the univariate between-subjects analyses for these variables with the four
attitudinal variables.
From Table 3, it is clear that job satisfaction, trust in management and organizational
commitment are not independent of an employee’s exposure to high-performance work
practices, even after controlling for the variance common to these attitudinal variables.
This provides further support for Hypotheses 1, 2, 3 and 4. Examination of the squared
partial etas also indicates that the HPWS index z-score is by far the most important
influence on all four work attitudes. For job satisfaction, the adjusted R2 shows 56 per
cent of the variance in this variable is explained by the model, with the HPWS index
score and organizational size being the only significant main effects. Trust in
management has the next strongest model with 48 per cent of the variance explained.
HPWS index scores and all three control variables have a significant association with this
work attitude, but the squared partial etas clearly show the high-performance scores to
be by far the most important variable (see Table 3).
Just over 43 per cent of the variance in affective organizational commitment is
explained by the MANCOVA model. From the partial etas, organizational size and age
have a minor influence compared to the employee’s experience of high-performance
work practices. The model for employees’ behavioural commitment to their
organizations explains just over 32 per cent of the variance in this variable, with only
HPWS scores and employee age contributing significantly. Of these, the influence of age
is minor in comparison.
The MANCOVA regression coefficient parameter estimates for the HPWS z-scores
with job satisfaction (B ¼ 0.103, t ¼ 21.59, p ¼ .000), trust in management
(B ¼ 0.122, t ¼ 18.31, p ¼ .000), affective commitment (B ¼ 0.105, t ¼ 16.89,
p ¼ .000) and behavioural commitment (B ¼ 0.090, t ¼ 13.18, p ¼ .000) were all
positive and statistically significant. This is consistent with the direction of influence
predicted by Hypotheses 1 to 4 and suggests a clear additive effect.
For the attitudinal variables where the control variable of organizational size
is statistically significant, the direction of influence in all instances is
negative. Being a member of a smaller organization is associated with higher job
satisfaction (B ¼ 2 0.109, t ¼ 25.97, p ¼ .000), higher levels of trust in one’s
management (B ¼ 20.172, t ¼ 2 6.73, p ¼ .000), and stronger affective commitment
(B ¼ 20.129, t ¼ 25.45, p ¼ .000). Shorter tenure is also associated with higher trust in
management (B ¼ 2 0.151, t ¼ 24.15, p ¼ .002). Finally, the direction of the parameter
Table 3 Tests of MANCOVA between-subjects effects for individual HR practices and interaction terms
Variable Job satisfaction Trust in management Affective commitment Behavioural commitment
F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2

Corrected model (df ¼ 4, 371) 119.49*** .566 86.93*** .487 71.15*** .439 45.81*** .333
Covariate main effects (df ¼ 1,367)
Years tenure (log) 0.07 .000 9.91** .026 1.89 .005 0.09 .000
Organizational size (log) 35.63*** .088 45.30*** .110 29.68*** .075 1.03 .003
Age 1.75 .005 9.69** .026 9.53** .025 5.32* .014
HPWS index z-score 466.44*** .560 335.31*** .477 285.59*** .438 173.75*** .321
Adjusted R2 .561 .481 .433 .326
Notes: * p , .05, ** p , .01, *** p , .001

estimates for age in relation to trust in management and organizational commitment
indicate that older employees are more likely to trust their managers (B ¼ 0.016,
t ¼ 3.11, p ¼ .002), have stronger affective commitment (B ¼ 0.015, t ¼ 3.09,
p ¼ .002) and are more likely to intend to remain employed by their organizations
(B ¼ 0.012, t ¼ 2.31, p ¼ .022). Although statistically significant, the effect sizes for age
are very small and are unlikely to have practical significance.
Partial correlation analyses were used to test for the predicted mediated relationships
(Bryman and Cramer, 2001) between HPWS practices and work attitudes proposed in
Hypotheses 5 and 6. In the first instance, the simple correlation of .607 between the HPWS
index z-score and affective organizational commitment (see Table 1) is considerably
weakened, although still statistically significant, when trust in management is statistically
controlled ( pr (408) ¼ .319, p ¼ .000). This finding is consistent with trust in

management partially mediating the observed HPWS-affective commitment relationship,
as proposed in Hypothesis 5. The observed simple correlation between HPWS index z-
score and behavioural commitment (r (402) ¼ .555, p ¼ .000) is also markedly weakened
once job satisfaction, trust in management and affective commitment are controlled ( pr
(399) ¼ .106, p ¼ .017). This finding is consistent with the mediated relationship between
HPWS practices and behavioural commitment proposed in Hypothesis 6.
Multiple regression analyses, followed by full latent variable structural equation
modelling (SEM), were used to further explore the pattern of relationships between the
HPWS variable and the work attitudes of interest in this study. To obtain the model
shown in Figure. 1, a hierarchical OLS regression analysis was performed for each of
the attitudinal criterion variables. For each analysis, the control variables of respondent
age, the log of years’ tenure and the log of organizational size were entered into the
regression equation first, followed by the HPWS index z-score and then the remaining
work attitude variables. The strongest standardized regression coefficient summarizing
the relationship between any two variables in these analyses was then used to
specify the variable relationships shown in Figure. 1, with the direction of the
connecting arrow indicating which variable was used as the predictor and which was
the criterion variable. Confirmatory structural equation modelling (using AMOS5) was
then used to test this empirically derived recursive causal model, with the standardized
regression weights being shown as the path coefficients. The SEM goodness-of-fit
statistics are indicative of a reasonable fit for the model. Both the Tucker – Lewis Index
(TLI) and comparative fit index (CFI) approach the .95 level taken as indicating a good
fit for large samples, while the goodness-of-fit index (GFI) and adjusted GFI show that
the model fits better than no model at all (Byrne, 2001). The root mean square error
Figure 1 Structural equation modelling path results.

Notes: N ¼ 404 after listwise deletion of missing data; a ¼ p ,.001 b ¼ p , .05 c ¼ ns;
goodness-of-fit statistics GFI ¼ .876 AGFI ¼ .845 TLI ¼ .927 CFI ¼ .937
RMSEA ¼ .067 (90% confidence interval ¼ .061 to .074)
(RMSEA) is also acceptably small and has a narrow confidence interval, suggesting
that the model has reasonable error of approximation.
No significant direct path was found between the HPWS index and behavioural
commitment (Beta ¼ .086, p ¼ .439). Nor were significant path coefficients found from
HPWS to affective commitment, or to trust in management (see Figure. 1). Nor was a
significant path found between trust and behavioural commitment. Instead, a clear path
goes from the HPWS index to job satisfaction, leading to affective commitment and
thence to stronger intentions to remain with one’s employer. A second clear path flows
from HPWS to job satisfaction, leading to trust in management, thence to affective
commitment and then behavioural commitment. Figure 1 also shows a direct link from
job satisfaction to behavioural commitment. Such findings are consistent with the
mediated relationships between HPWS practices and organizational commitment

proposed in Hypotheses 5 and 6, with job satisfaction, trust in management and affective
commitment mediating any relationship between employee perceptions of HPWS
practices and their intentions of remaining with or leaving their employer. Job
satisfaction would appear to be the key linking variable.
Testing for HPWS complementarities

Having established that an employee’s experiences of HR practices normatively
associated with high-performance work systems are additively associated with job
satisfaction, trust in management and organizational commitment, a further aim of this
research was to determine whether significant interaction effects could be found between
these practices when predicting these attitudinal variables. This is a test of the
‘complementarities thesis’ (Godard, 2004) from an employee perspective.
To analyse this thesis, the unmodified responses to each of the 16 items were used in a
three-phase, MANCOVA process. In the first phase, multivariate tests using Pillai’s
trace statistic were performed to identify individual HR practices that were independent
of any of the attitudinal variables, and which therefore could be dropped from further
analyses. Using these analyses, the following six variables were eliminated: the use
of internal recruitment (trace (4, 338) ¼ 0.88, p ¼ .477); working in a team (trace
(4, 338) ¼ 0.51, p ¼ .727); formal appraisal of job performance in the past 12 months
(trace (4, 338) ¼ 0.96 p ¼ .430); taking part in an employee attitude survey in the past
12 months (trace (4, 338) ¼ 0.74, p ¼ .568); being provided with sufficient opportunities
for training and development (trace (4, 338) ¼ 1.41, p ¼ .232); and having an accurate
job description (trace (4, 338) ¼ 1.93, p ¼ .105).
In the second phase, responses to each of the remaining 10 HR practices were
analysed to identify the significant main effects for each attitudinal variable and for
which interaction terms could then be specified in the third and final phase of the
MANCOVA analysis. In these analyses, the two dichotomous HR variables relating to
pay-for-performance were entered as factors, while the remaining HR practice variables
and the control variables of log tenure, log organizational size and age were entered as
covariates. The findings for the third phase of the MANCOVA analyses are shown in
Table 4. Because the interaction term used for each dependent variable was different, the
findings shown in Table 4 represent the outcomes of four separate MANCOVA models,
each analysis being specific to a particular attitude.
In addition to the significant main effects for the individual HR practices shown in
Table 4, statistically significant interaction terms were obtained for job satisfaction, trust
in management, and behavioural commitment, but not for affective commitment. While
only partial support was therefore found for Hypothesis 7, this suggests that synergistic
Table 4 Tests of MANCOVA between-subjects effects for individual HR practices and interaction terms

Corrected model (df ¼ 14, 371) 50.22*** .663 38.49*** .602 26.79*** .512 20.03*** .440
Covariate main effects (df ¼ 1,357)
Years tenure (log) 1.59 .004 3.47 .010 0.33 .001 1.82 .005

Organizational size (log) 8.11** .022 11.71** .032 9.28** .025 0.78 .002
Age 1.32 .004 6.68* .018 6.54* .018 7.04** .019
a) Able to participate in 0.13 .000 1.43 .004 0.02 .000 2.39 .007
profit share or ESOP
b) Received performance-based pay in 0.46 .001 0.00 .000 0.82 .002 0.11 .000
past years
c) Information provided on firm 11.82** .032 13.88*** .037 2.06 .006 16.17*** .043
performance
d) Policy of avoiding compulsory 3.29 .009 17.77*** .047 5.62* .015 0.11 .000
redundancies
e) Few status differences 16.75*** .045 20.79*** .055 9.89** .027 0.07 .000
f) Career opportunities through promotion 1.10 .003 3.02 .008 12.01** .033 0.52 .001
g) Fair promotion process 42.94*** .107 49.89*** .123 21.59*** .057 25.84*** .067
h) Involvement in decision making 20.70*** .055 7.95** .022 9.67** .026 19.20*** .051
i) Feedback on performance 17.95*** .048 5.23* .014 1.73 .005 2.52 .007
555
Table 4 (Continued)


j) Fair and accurate performance 25.86*** .068 30.89*** .080 11.87** .032 12.69*** .034
appraisal
Interaction term
c*e*g*h*i*j 8.80** .024
c*d*e*g*h*i*j* 10.39** .028
d*e*f*g*h*j 1.36 .004
c*g*h*j 9.45** .026
Adjusted R2 .650 .586 .493 .418
Notes: * p , .05, ** p , .01, *** p , .001

relationships exist among HR practices for at least some outcome variables. However,
examining the squared partial etas shows that the interaction terms contribute little
to each of the overall models. Furthermore, the regression coefficient parameter
estimates for the interaction terms in the MANCOVA model for job satisfaction
(B ¼ 21.007E-05, t ¼ 2 2.97, p ¼ .003), trust in management (B ¼ 23.963E-07,
t ¼ 2 3.22, p ¼ .001) and behavioural commitment (B ¼ 2 0.001, t ¼ 2 3.07, p ¼ .002)
are not only small, but also negative, as is the non-significant interaction term for
affective commitment (B ¼ 26.580E-06, t ¼ 21.16, p ¼ .245). This is opposite to what
is predicted by the complementariness thesis; that is, that the interactions between HR
practices normatively associated with HPWSs would result in improved work attitudes
over and above the influence of any significant main effects.
Examining the main effects shown in Table 4, there is evidence for a bundle of three
HR practices that are predictive of all four work attitudes – ‘having a promotion
process that is perceived as fair’, ‘having the opportunity to be involved in decision
making’, and ‘having a performance appraisal system that is perceived as both fair and
accurate’. ‘Having few status differences between managers and other employees’ was
predictive for job satisfaction, trust and affective commitment, but not for behavioural
commitment. ‘Being provided with information on how well the firm was doing’ was
also predictive of job satisfaction, trust and behavioural commitment, but not affective
commitment. No other practice was found to be associated with more than two of the
work attitudes studied here.
Furthermore, the squared partial etas in Table 4 show that the statistical importance of
any given HR practice varies depending on the dependent variable of interest. For job
satisfaction, having a fair promotion process accounted for most of the variance,
followed by a fair and accurate performance appraisal system, involvement in decision
making and receiving performance feedback. For trust in management, having a fair
promotion process was the strongest influence, followed by a fair and accurate
performance appraisal system and having few status differentials. A fair promotion
process was also the most important variable for behavioural and affective commitment,
followed by career opportunities for affective commitment, and involvement in decision
making for behavioural commitment.
Discussion and conclusion

In theory, HPWSs can provide win-win benefits for firms and employees (Machin and
Wood, 2005) but can also generate win-lose combinations and even lose-lose outcomes
(Boxall and Purcell, 2003: 22 –3). In this study, we have examined employee-level
outcomes. The direction and strength of the correlational analyses lends support to the
notion that HR practices normatively associated with HPWSs have an additive, positive
relationship with employee work attitudes (Hypotheses 1 to 4). Experience of a greater
number of such practices co-varies with employees also reporting higher job satisfaction,
a greater degree of trust in the management of their firms, a stronger psychological
identification with their employing organizations, and a stronger intention to remain
employed with those organizations. Thus, the study supports the findings of prior work
that firms that add more high-performance work practices will generally have more
satisfied employees (e.g. Appelbaum et al., 2000; Guest, 1999, 2002).
Does this imply that it is always in the interest of firms and employees for
management to add more high-performance work practices? This would be an unwise
conclusion. Existing studies suggest that HPWSs are not always cost-effective for firms
(e.g. Cappelli and Neumark, 2001; Datta et al., 2005; Godard, 2001, 2004; Guthrie, 2001;
Way, 2002). Rather, they need to be evaluated by firms or business units based on
whether their benefits exceed their costs in their specific context. Our study does not
include labour productivity or financial variables (which need to be provided by
managerial respondents or, better still, through objective data) and, thus, the commercial
benefits to firms are not something we report. However, what we do show is that adding
more HPWS practices should lead, via job satisfaction and thence, both directly and
indirectly through increased trust in management and affective commitment, to
employees having stronger intentions to remain with their employer (Hypotheses 5 and 6;
Figure 1).
Given the relationships noted earlier in this paper between job satisfaction and
customer satisfaction, between turnover cognitions and voluntary employee turnover,
and between satisfaction and commitment and both organizational and individual
performance, these findings do provide support for the notion that employee work-
related attitudes play an important role in mediating the impact of HPWSs on
organizational outcomes. Those firms that seek improved satisfaction and commitment
in their particular context should, therefore, see a business benefit from adding high-
performance work practices. For example, firms facing tight labour markets and/or
employing highly-skilled professional workers in differentiated service markets may
have much to gain from investing in HPWSs in order to protect their human capital
investments (Batt, 2000; Boxall, 2003). Similarly, service firms seeking to build
satisfied, loyal customers through high levels of employee satisfaction can expect to
gain from implementing more of the HPWS practices identified here. Thus, there are
potentially win-win outcomes in the appropriate contexts.
But the evidence presented here also suggests that we should not rush to the
conclusion that more HPWS practices will always be better for employees. Our study
adds to previous research on the ‘complementarities thesis’ (Godard, 2004). For three
of our four dependent variables (affective commitment is the exception), we find
significant interaction terms among practices (Hypothesis 7). However, the effect
sizes of these interaction terms are weak indeed and, therefore, provide little by way
of additional explanatory power. Furthermore, while experience of individual HPWS
practices is generally related to improvements in employee attitudes, the direction of
influence of the interactions on these work attitudes was negative – opposite to what
theorists typically mean by complementarities. As Cappelli and Neumark (2001:
759 – 60) observe, ‘implementing practice A in conjunction with practice B is better
than introducing practice A in isolation... but this does not necessarily mean that the
joint implementation of the bundle of work practices A and B is beneficial on net.’
Our findings suggest, as Godard (2004) argues, that there are limits to the positive
effects of high-performance work systems for employees.
It can be posited, for example, that the outcomes from HPWSs for employees become
less optimal as complexity increases: when, for example, performance appraisal is added
to teamwork in a flattened hierarchy, along with increased participation in decision
making, enhanced information flows, and so on. The pressure of so many management
initiatives risks overloading employees. It is also possible that over-zealous adoption of
HPWSs results in the intensification of work for employees (e.g. Green, 2004), leading in
turn to feelings of stress and thus reducing the benefits on the employee side (e.g. Ramsay
et al., 2000). Future research should pursue this line of enquiry, examining the
circumstances under which employees experience HPWSs as negative intensification
rather than as positive improvements in their quality of working life, and whether both
effects occur simultaneously in an antagonistic fashion. The potential for management
practices associated with work–life balance programmes, to moderate any work
intensification effects arising from the implementation of HPWS practices, is also worthy
of further study (White et al., 2003).
Our study may also throw light on the universalism –contingency debate in strategic
HRM (e.g. Becker and Huselid, 1998; Boxall and Purcell, 2003; Guest et al., 2004). Guest
et al. (2004: 83) comment that ‘a major conceptual and empirical challenge for HR
research concerns how to identify and measure the bundles or systems of practices.’
Indeed, contingency theorists argue that there may be many different HPWSs that emerge
and work only under specific conditions. A contingency view might therefore explain prior
research findings of considerable variability in the degree to which HR practices associated
with high-performance work systems have been implemented (e.g. Ichniowski et al., 1996;
Pil and MacDuffie, 1996), and the failure so far to identify a consistently replicable bundle
or cluster of HPWS practices (Guest et al., 2004; Wright and Boswell, 2002).
The approaches recommended to date for identifying HR bundles include the use of
internal reliability statistics, factor analysis and cluster analysis (e.g. MacDuffie, 1995),
and more recently regression analysis and sequential tree analysis (Guest et al., 2004).
The approach taken in the present study departs from these. In effect, we explore
whether, given a heterogeneous sample of workers employed in a diverse range of firms,
we could identify a common set of HPWS practices that predict all four work attitudes.
What we have found is that three out of 16 practices are consistently significant
predictors of all four employee work related attitudes – ‘a fair promotion process’,
‘having the opportunity to be involved in decision making’, and ‘having a performance
appraisal system that is perceived as fair and accurate’. Yet, the relative influence of
these individual practices on each attitude was variable and not overwhelmingly strong in
any given instance. Clearly much of the variance in satisfaction, trust and commitment is
being explained by variables other than these three; variables that may reflect contingent
differences in the employment context.
However, if we add the ‘reduction of status differentials’ and the ‘provision of
information to employees about how well their firm is doing’ (predictive of three of the
four work attitudes) to the three common HR practices, then this might imply that ‘HR
strategies’ that foster two-way communication and that build employee perceptions of
fairness in the employment relationship will have benefits for many firms in improving
employee attitudes. Fairness perceptions, as noted in our literature review, are important
for building trust in management and organizational commitment (e.g. Guest, 1999;
Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002).
We also find support for our theoretical proposition that the level of employee trust in
their managers influences the degree to which they identify with the values of the
organization, want to put effort into its success and feel pride in belonging to it. It is also
clear from our findings that trust is influenced by management’s use of the kind of HPWS
practices measured in this study, although mediated first by the employee’s experience of
job satisfaction arising from such practices. Whitener’s (2001) application of social
exchange theory to explaining employee attitudinal responses to HR practices has
explanatory power here – employees reciprocate their perceptions of management’s
actions as trustworthy and fair with increased loyalty and commitment (see also
Whitener et al., 1998 and Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002), but only to the extent that
these actions also result in satisfying work. This mediating role of job satisfaction in the
HPWS –trust relationship was unexpected but is not inconsistent with the conceptual
definition of trust in management outlined earlier. Being satisfied with one’s job would
seem a reasonable precursor to believing that management acts in ways that are
beneficial to the employee and are competent.
Finally, we note the limitations of our study. The first and most obvious is the cross-
sectional research design. We cannot definitively establish a causal direction from HR
practices to employee attitudes, although some of the statistical analyses performed are
amenable to such an interpretation. Reverse or even reciprocal causality is plausible,
perhaps even probable: employers whose HR practices lead to more satisfied, trusting
and committed employees may then find it easier to implement more and better practices
associated with HPWSs. The sequencing of the attitudinal responses we have identified
also requires replication. A priori testing for a nonrecursive model would also be justified
in subsequent research.
All self-report cross-sectional designs are of course potentially subject to the
methodological artefact of common method variance. However, some researchers have
concluded that there is little or no evidence substantiating the existence of common

method variance or, by implication, significant percept-percept inflation (e.g. Spector,
1987). Percept-percept inflation in self-report data is a complex problem in
organizational research (Wright et al., 2003). Indeed, the presence or otherwise of
common method variance is dependent on the research discipline and the construct being
studied (Podsakoff et al., 2003), and may, therefore, not have the broad effects asserted
by some critics of the self-report method. For example, Crampton and Wagner (1994)
conclude from their examination of 42,934 correlations published in 581 articles that
percept-percept inflation may be the exception rather than the rule in micro-
organizational research and, therefore, does not warrant any general condemnation of
self-report methods. Podsakoff et al. (2003) also note that, even if present, common
method variance can either inflate or deflate relationships between constructs leading
variously to either Type I or Type II errors. It cannot, therefore, be automatically
assumed that common method variance always increases the risk of falsely rejecting a
null hypothesis.
Furthermore, as Whitener (2001) observes, the factorial independence of measures
goes some way to obviating the possible problem of common method variance.
Numerous studies have shown the principal work attitudes of organizational
commitment, job satisfaction and trust to be conceptually and factorial distinct
(e.g. Brooke et al., 1988; Cook and Wall, 1980; Mathieu and Farr, 1991). In the present
study, factor analysis of all attitudinal items revealed a six-factor solution with the first
factor largely comprising the trust-in-management variable, the second being the job
satisfaction items, the third factor the positive items in the OCQ (affective commitment),
and the fourth the negative items in the OCQ (behavioural commitment) (see Appendix).
Furthermore, an attempt was made to reduce the likelihood that social desirability, one of
the more likely sources of common method variance in self-reports (Kline et al., 2000),
would have worked in favour of the hypotheses this study investigates. To this end, the
HR practice questions were placed after the attitudinal questions in an attempt to reduce a
possible order effect of the former influencing the latter (Feldman and Lynch, 1988).
The trust and organizational commitment scale also contained some reverse-scored
items, thereby reducing response acquiescence (Lindell and Whitney, 2001).
To sum up, the findings of this study show a clear additive effect for the
relationship between HR practices normatively associated with what has been variously
referred to as high-involvement, high-commitment or high-performance HRM and some
important employee attitudes towards work. While the interaction effects posited by
some researchers as indicative of synergy between these individual practices were found
for three of the four dependent variables, these cannot be interpreted as supportive of the
core HPWS notion of complementariness between HR practices, at least not when
employee attitudes are the outcome variables in question. This does not disprove the
thesis that HR practices act in complementary ways when influencing desirable outcomes
at the level of the business unit or firm. Our findings are concerned with employee
attitudes and there is still a strong logic to the idea that firms need to bundle HR practices
to achieve compatible improvements in employee ability, motivation and opportunity to
contribute (Boxall and Purcell, 2003; Delery and Shaw, 2001; Gerhart, 2004). We do,
however, see our results as supporting the argument of Ramsay et al. (2000) that the
impacts of HPWSs are neither simplistically exploitative, on the one hand, nor
straightforwardly win-win, on the other. If high employer –employee mutuality is the
goal, there is an important balance to be struck.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Professor J. H. K Inkson and Associate-Professor S. Carr,
both of Massey University, and Dr Marc Orlitzky of Auckland University, for their
feedback on various aspects of this research. We would also like to thank the hundreds of
people who gave freely of their time to participate in this research. The research was
funded by a Massey University, College of Business, Business Research Fund grant
(no. A02/R/828).
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Appendix: Factor analysis with varimax rotation for all attitudinal items
Variable F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6
JS1 .12 .51 .20 .12 2 .26
JS2 .22 .65 .20 .13
JS3 .24 .47
JS4 .44 .56 .21 .19 .15 .11
JS5 .47 .48 .19 .17
JS6 .29 .64 .25 .13
JS7 .19 .46 .16 .11 .35
JS8 .31 .62 .27 .16 .12 .29
JS9 .13 .68 .25 .16 .20 .14
JS10 .64 .37 .23 .15 .15 .23
JS11 .34 .42 .32 .19 .30
JS12 .68 .38 .31 .13 .18
JS13 .43 .59 .22 .27 .29
JS14 .25 .31 .17 .14 2 .12
JS15 .55 .31 .13 .17
JS16 .37 .49 .12 .13 .14
TIM1 .70 .32 .29 .15 .17
TIM2 .63 .13 .21
Appendix: (Continued)
Variable F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6
TIM3 .79 .20 .26
TIM4 .74 .28 .31 .11
TIM5 .63 .39 .33 .18
TIM6 .64 .21 .13 .29
OCQ9-1 .44 .35 .57 .29 .16
OCQ9-2 .13 .19 .59 .14
OCQ9-3 .22 .48 2.18 .25
OCQ9-4 .51 .20 .55 .19
OCQ9-5 .38 .29 .63 .30 .10

OCQ9-6 .38 .37 .57 .16
OCQ9-7 .20 .27 .58 .22
OCQ9-8 .11 .19 .69 .24
OCQ9-9 .26 .26 .69 .25 .15
OCQ6-1 2.13 2 .13 2 .13 2 .58
OCQ6-2 2.18 2 .33 2 .19
OCQ6-3 2.13 2 .21 2 .20 2 .45 2 .13
OCQ6 2 4 2.28 2 .21 2 .29 2 .47 2 .42
OCQ6-5 2 .55 2 .17 2 .15 2.44 2 .13 2 .19
OCQ6-6 2.27 2 .29 2 .34 2.53 2 .18 .12
% variance 17.38 15.15 12.70 6.38 2.35 1.47
Notes: JS ¼ Job satisfaction items TIM ¼ trust-in-management items OCQ9 ¼ Affective commitment items
OCQ6 ¼ Behavioural commitment items. Item loadings below .10 omitted.

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This article was downloaded by: [Laurentian University]

On: 22 April 2013, At: 20:42

The International Journal of Human Resource

The relationship between ‘high-performance work

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585190601178745

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The relationship between ‘high-

Keith Macky and Peter Boxall

Abstract In order to improve our understanding of mediating variables inside the

Keywords High-performance work systems; bundling; strategic HRM; job satisfaction;

Keith Macky, Department of Management, Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag

of HPWSs on employees, an area where it is recognized that more research is needed.

Theoretical framework and hypotheses

The mediating role of employee responses

practices include the use of internal recruitment, merit-based promotions, providing

Job satisfaction, employee commitment and trust in management

Hypothesis 1: Employee scores on a HPWS index will be positively and significantly

We then generated two hypotheses concerned with mediation. In other words, as

Hypothesis 5: Trust in management will partially mediate any observed relation-

Finally, we generated a seventh hypothesis designed to test the ‘complementarities

Macky and Boxall: HPWS and employee attitudes

practices commonly referred to in the literature. These practices, as well as example

Macky and Boxall: HPWS and employee attitudes

HR practice domain Example citations Measurement items

Control variables The participant variables of age, gender (1 ¼ female, 0 ¼ male),

F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2

Notes: * p , .05, ** p , .01, *** p , .001

controlled ( pr (408) ¼ .319, p ¼ .000). This finding is consistent with trust in

Figure 1 Structural equation modelling path results.

mediated relationships between HPWS practices and organizational commitment

Testing for HPWS complementarities

F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2

Macky and Boxall: HPWS and employee attitudes

Variable Job satisfaction Trust in management Affective commitment Behavioural commitment

F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2 F Partial eta 2

Adjusted R2 .650 .586 .493 .418

Notes: * p , .05, ** p , .01, *** p , .001

Discussion and conclusion

concluded that there is little or no evidence substantiating the existence of common

A Guide for Social Scientists. London: Routledge.

Industrial Relations, 42(2): 349 – 78.

Stamford, CT and London: JAI Press.

OCQ9-5 .38 .29 .63 .30 .10

% variance 17.38 15.15 12.70 6.38 2.35 1.47

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Notes: * p , .05, p , .01, * p , .001

Notes: * p , .05, p , .01, * p , .001