High-performance Work Practices,Affective Commitment of Employees and Organizational Performance: A Multi-level Modelling Using 2-1-2 Mediation Analysis

Abstract

The link between high-performance work practices (HPWP) and organizational performance has often been oversimplified, and our understanding as to the mechanisms linking the two is inconclusive, and this study offers some insights by taking HPWP as perceived by employees rather than that reported by managers and proximal employee-level outcomes as intervening explanations. The study examines the influence of employee perceptions towards HPWP use on organizational performance through the mediating variable ‘affective commitment of employee (ACE)’. Data for the study were collected from employees of 30 business units administering pre-existing questionnaires. The model was tested using 2-1-2 mediation analysis (‘bathtub’) as proposed by Croon and van Veldhoven (2007) and it fits well with data. It has important theoretical contributions that perceptions of employees towards HPWP use play an important role and HPWP result in organizational performance through employee-level outcomes such as ACE, the knowledge of which may help practicing managers for getting the best from employees. However, findings of the study are subject to the limitations in that the research suffers in terms of establishing causality, namely, use of cross-sectional data and lack of experimental research design.

Keywords

High-performance work practices affective commitment of employees organizational performance multi-level modelling

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