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This study investigates whether employee perceptions of High Involvement Work Systems (HIWS) mediate the positive relationship between implemented-HIWS and the parallel outcomes of employee well-being and organisational performance. To test these relationships, data was collected from 20,646 employees and 2066 managers in 198 organisations from Spanish industrial companies (mainly small and medium enterprises, SMEs). Results from a 2-1-2 multilevel structural equation modelling analysis showed that implemented-HIWS are positively related to perceived-HIWS, which in turn, are positively associated with both financial performance and the well-being outcomes of job satisfaction and positive affect while being negatively associated with the well-being outcome of negative affect. Finally, the study also showed a direct negative effect of implemented-HIWS on job satisfaction suggesting that the source from which HIWS are rated matters for their consequences on some well-being outcomes. We discuss the implications of these results for theory and practice.

PurposeThis paper examines the extent to which investment in human capital (HC) influences employee well-being, focusing on companies in the Basque Country in Northern Spain. Specifically, it analyzes the effects of worker perceptions of high-involvement work system (HIWS) on job satisfaction (JS) and affective commitment (AC), directly and through the mediating role of trust in management. This trust mediating role was also explored by analyzing the isolated effects of high-involvement work processes (power, information, reward and knowledge [PIRK] enhancing practices) on JS and AC.Design/methodology/approachThe structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was used on a sample of 2,199 employees from 425 organizations working in different industries. As the study was performed at the organizational level, aggregation was conducted first.FindingsThe findings revealed that trust partially mediated the relationship between HIWS and JS, although AC was directly predicted by the system. In contrast, a trust mediating role was confirmed in the relationship between all PIRK processes, JS and AC.Originality/valueThis study highlights the “hinge” role of trust in linking high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) as an approach to assess HC in organizations and well-being at work. It further conceptualizes HIWS via a PIRK model and operationalizes it through systemic and dimensional approach.

In the fast-changing global workplace of today, maintaining competitive advantage has become imperative to survival. Employees matter today more than ever since they become non-imitable sources of firm uniqueness that can deliver value to every stakeholder. Based on this, the field of Strategic HRM has gained a special interest among researchers and practitioners since it employs a strategic approach to the role of employees within the organisations. However, looking at the business world results, it looks like there is a divorce between academia and practitioners and that they are operating in a parallel way. With the aim of evidencing this gap and echoing this issue, this chapter is structured as follows. It starts with a summary of the research conducted under the SHRM field in the last two decades. It follows with a section that evidences the gap between research and practice showing the results of global companies’ surveys related to people management. In the third section a special focus on big companies is done due to their importance when legitimizing managerial trends. The chapter finishes with some conclusions and thoughts for future managers.

Group Model Building (GMB) is a methodology which involves a target group in the business of model formulation and conceptualization. It is crucial to obtain extended formal models and accelerate group decision support for future model building. In this paper the development of two GMB workshops for two Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) from the Basque Industrial Sector is presented. These workshops focused on one problem: the analysis of the commitment of workers to the organization. Each session in each company was of four-hour duration and involved eight workers and two facilitators. This article highlights the importance of involving decision-making agents from each company in the reflection and process of finding solutions for their problem. The results suggest that in spite of the inherent differences and distinct features of each company, both have important similarities when tackling the same problem. These similarities could be translated to a general pattern conceptual model, which could be simulated as a generic model in the future.

In contrast to shareholder-owned organizations, worker-owned cooperative organizations foster employee wellbeing such as employee satisfaction as an important outcome by itself. Due to expansions and economic fluctuations, larger worker-owned cooperations nowadays use mixtures of employment contracts resulting in varying shares of co-owners, contracted and temporary employees in workplaces. In the current paper, we research if this situation challenges the moral commitment of worker cooperatives to their employees, which derive from the cooperative philosophy on corporate responsibility. Where previous research contrasted employee wellbeing in worker cooperatives with share- holder owner organizations, this paper describes how various shares of co-owners in workplaces change mediating processes of helping climate and workplace participation and ultimately result in different levels of employee satisfaction. Archival data combined with survey data of 5907 employees in 99 hypermarkets were tested with multivariate analyses, and indicated that the helping climate and workplace participation positively mediated the association between the share of co-owners in hypermarkets and employee satisfaction. The findings imply that traditional worker-owned cooperatives, where a majority of all workers are owners, had more success in fostering cooperative values as a strategic outcome.

In our increasingly globalised economy, managing continuous change and remaining competitive has become a central issue for organisations in the industrial sector. Building a sustainable competitive advantage through effective decision making and the use of decision making tools has been widely studied [1,2]. The success of a company will be dependent on the skills of the workers, their capacity for learning, and adapting to special and evolving client necessities. Culture change via, communication and participation are the elements of change identified for engineering companies [3]. Thus, the main objective of this research is to understand the behaviour of commitment, the variables that influence it and the variables that are influenced by it. Commitment is considered a key factor due to its influence on performance. The methodology that was followed was based on the modelling methodology proposed by Sterman [4]. The first step was the problem definition, the second step was data collection. The purpose was to define the feedback loops of which the conceptual model (CM) is composed. Thirdly, conceptual model definition was developed. As a result, the final outcome that is achieved through this research is a conceptual model. The main function of this model is to facilitate the understanding of the behaviour of commitment through Systems Thinking tools. This research contributes to both Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) and Systems Thinking (ST) fields of study. The most notable contribution for ST is the fact of combining more than one input source (Literature + Group Model Building + prior research) for the conceptual model definition. The combination of these input sources for an ST model is not common in the scientific community. Moreover, the use of ST in SHRM is limited. Keywords: Commitment, Systems Thinking, Group Model Building, Strategic Human Resource Management.

Research in the field of human resource management has, for the past 30 years, focused on understanding the effects of HRM practices. The empirical evidence largely supports the proposition that HR...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how management and employee perspectives of high-performance work systems (HPWS) relate to employee discretionary behaviour. In addition, the paper examines to what extent the relationship between employees’ perception of the HPWS and discretionary behaviour varies among different organizations/groups. Design/methodology/approach – Two samples were used in the study. The first sample included data from 51 managers and 1,023 employees from 26 manufacturing companies. The second sample included 52 managers and 6,382 employees from 42 manufacturing companies. Findings – The study shows that employee rated HPWS mediates the relationship between management rated HPWS and individual-level discretionary behaviour. Moreover, results showed that the effect of employee rated HPWS on discretionary behaviour varies among different organizations/groups. Practical implications – Results show that employee perceptions of the HPWS more strongly predict employees’ discretionary behaviour than management rated HPWS. Moreover, it shows that employees’ perceptions of the same HPWS, but operating in different organizational contexts exhibit different levels of discretionary behaviour. Originality/value – The study differentiates between management and employee perspectives of the HPWS. It also examines the variability of the relationship between HPWS and discretionary behaviour. Multilevel structural equation modelling is used to test the hypotheses.

Project management discipline has undergone significant changes in the past decades (Hanisch and Wald in Project Management Journal 42(3):4–22, 2011). The project management influencing factors have been the subject of empirical studies. This paper examines the link between some of these factors and project success, through a survey with the participation of 121 project managers in the Basque Country in Northern Spain. The most important result of this study is the relevance of project manager skills and characteristics, and their influence on project success.

Several studies in strategic human resource management have described a relationship between people-management practices and organizational performance. However, the mediating processes that explain such a relationship remain unexplored. This study examines how both the actual people-management system (assessed by managers) and the perceived system (assessed by employees) influence employees' commitment, and how this in turn contributes to employee and organizational outcomes. Multilevel analyses of a sample of 732 employees from 26 Spanish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) supported a model in which employees' commitment mediates between the actual system and unit-level absenteeism, which in turn has an effect on productivity. Results also showed the importance of the perceived system in attempting to understand the true effect of the actual system on employees' commitment to the organization.