Able, willing, and knowing: the effects of HR practices on commitment and effort in 26 European countries

Abstract

This study extends previous studies of human resource (HR) practices by examining how organizational commitment and work effort are related to the use of HR practices enhancing discretion and skills based on international comparative survey data from 26 European countries. By analyzing individual level data instead of the organizational level data that are examined in prior studies, this article allows investigating whether and how employee perceptions of HR practices are related to their attitudes and behavior. The multilevel analyses largely support the hypotheses that both the intensity and the consistency of these HR practices contribute to organizational commitment and work effort since they enhance the ability of employees and their willingness to cooperate and inform them about the expectations of the organization.

Keywords:

• comparative human resource management
• human resource practices
• international comparative research
• multilevel analysis
• organizational commitment
• work effort

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the useful comments on the earlier version of the paper.

Notes

1. That the number of respondents differs between the countries does not have to be problematic as they are supposed to be representative of the workforce of each country. However, to be sure that these differences do not affect the outcomes, sensitivity tests are conducted by investigating multilevel models on subsets of countries. In these analyses 25 countries are included while one of the countries is excluded. This procedure is repeated for all countries. The results from these analyses are similar to those reported in this article.