The roles of justice climates on high-investment human resource system and unit/individual performance relationships

Abstract

While there is evidence that high-investment human resource system (HIHRS) use is related to positive behavioral outcomes, our understanding of the underlying mechanism is wanting. Answering the calls for more cross-level human resource management (HRM) studies, we integrate and build on contemporary organizational justice climate research and the extant cross-level HRM research to investigate unit justice climates as novel mechanisms through which unit HIHRS use may advance the performance of units and their members. Adopting a multi-level and multi-source approach, we develop and test a moderated mediation model to explain how unit-level HIHRS use relates to unit and individual task performance. Analysis of multi-source data from 701 managers, 120 food and beverage units and 40 hotel properties of a multinational hotel chain illuminated the mediating influence of unit overall justice climates on the relationships between unit HIHRS use and unit and individual task performance. Moreover, unit procedural and distributive justice climates were found to have positive interactive effects on that performance. The current study’s findings, practical implications, limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• High-investment human resource system
• task performance
• organizational justice climates
• procedural justice
• distributive justice
• cross-level interaction effects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Table

Notes

1 While various terms have been used in the strategic HRM literature that describes this type of HR system, including but not limited to high commitment, high-involvement, and high performance, Wood et al. (2003) note that these terms are often used synonymously. For instance, Datta et al. (2005) treat high-performance work systems and high-involvement HR systems as synonymous. Given some conceptual issues noted regarding tautology (i.e., the label of these HR system describing the expected outcome), we use the term high-investment human resource system in this study, following Chadwick et al. (2013), Way et al. (2010) and Jiang et al. (in press).

2 Note that Tremblay et al. (2010) and Kloutsiniotis and Mihail (2020) adopted an individual-level research design. Tremblay et al. (2010) examine the link between employee-perceived HRM practices use and employee affective commitment, in-role and extra-role behaviors. Kloutsiniotis and Mihail (2020) examine the link between employee-perceived HR system use and employee service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior. Hence, they do not examine an HR system at a higher-level of analysis (such as at the unit-level in our case).

3 Due to the hierarchical nature of these units, the number of potential respondents at the higher levels were inevitably smaller. L1 F&B manager units’ responses ranged between 1 to 3: 18 establishments with one response, 20 with two responses, and two with three responses (typically a hotel property has two L1 F&B managers). L2 F&B manager units’ responses ranged between 1 to 9: 18 establishments with one response, 12 with two responses, six with three responses, one with four responses, two with six responses, and one with nine responses (typically a hotel property has two or three L2 F&B managers). L3 F&B manager units’ responses ranged between 1 and 55: four establishments with one response, two with three responses, one each with four, six, and seven responses, four with eight responses, and the remaining establishments with more than 10 responses (the number of L3 F&B managers varies by unit/hotel property location). This sample was part of a larger HRM study (the data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request).

4 Liao and Rupp (2005) also find similar correlations between (organization-focused) procedural justice climate and (organization-focused) informational justice climate (r = .83), (organization-focused) procedural justice climate and (organization-focused) interpersonal justice climate (r = .79), and (organization-focused) informational justice climate and (organization-focused) interpersonal justice climate (r = .73). Even though they do not capture (organization-focused) distributive justice climate, we would expect the correlation between distributive justice climate and other three justice climates to be similarly correlated. Given that higher correlation between these two justice climate facets make it more difficult to find significant interaction effect, our test should be considered more conservative.

5 We do note, however, that the main effects of procedural and distributive justice climates became non-significant with the introduction of the interaction term.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by Research Grant Counsil of Hong Kong (CERG#HKUST6483/06H).