Demands or Resources? The Relationship Between HR Practices, Employee Engagement, and Emotional Exhaustion Within a Hybrid Model of Employment Relations.

This article explores the ways in which employees may experience and respond to tensions inherent in the mix of potentially conflicting human resource ( HR) practices that compose hybrid models of employment relations. By drawing on the job demands-resources ( JD-R) literature and viewing HR practices as 'demands' and 'resources,' we explore the impact of performance management and employee voice practices on employee well-being, as exemplified by engagement and emotional exhaustion, in a large public-sector organization in Ireland. Our findings suggest that employee voice mechanisms may act as a resource in both enhancing engagement and in counterbalancing the demands presented by a performance management system, thus reducing the deleterious effects of emotional exhaustion. Our study extends understanding of hybrid models of human resource management ( HRM) and of the ways in which employees manage the contradictory signals that such models may send in terms of performance expectations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]