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DAVIDGUEST*
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wo main approaches to human resource management (HRM) are identified: one focusing on the organisational concern for the relationship between HRM and performance, the other mounting a critique of HRM. It is argued that both pay lip service to, but largely neglect worker reactions to HRM. The case is made for building the worker into the analysis of HRM, on the one hand, by incorporating worker attitudes and behaviour in the study of the HRM-performance relationship, and on the other, by paying serious attention to the association between HRM and worker-related outcomes. Evidence is presented to suggest that worker attitudes and behaviour mediate the HRM-performance relationship and that certain HR practices are associated with higher work and life satisfaction. These practices include job design, direct participation and information provision that are associated with higher performance; but work satisfaction is also associated with equal opportunities, family-friendly and anti-harassment practices. It is suggested that a more worker-friendly HRM can best be applied in the context of a partnership or mutual gains framework.HRM AND THE NEGLECT OF WORKERS
The view that people are an organisation’s most important assets and that their effective development and deployment offers a distinctive and non-imitable competitive advantage, has spurred interest in the effective management of human resources. That interest has been enhanced by a growing number of studies reporting a positive relationship between human resource practices and corporate performance. In parallel, a number of writers have been critical of the growing interest in human resource management (HRM) and of its impact on workers. A feature of both advocates and critics of HRM is their neglect of direct evidence about the role and reaction of workers. The aim of this paper is to re-focus attention on the worker, in other words, to bring the worker centre-stage in the analysis and study of HRM.
The neglect of workers in the analysis of HRM and performance is easier to understand if we trace one stream of interest in the HRM-performance link to business schools and the role of HRM in business strategy. While a narrow unitarist view could argue that what is good for the organisation is good for the worker, it is unlikely to cut much ice with those in Europe, Australia and indeed in the USA who have approached the topic from an employment relations perspective and within a more pluralist framework. Furthermore, the neglect of employee attitudes and behaviour leaves partly unexplained the process whereby HRM may have an impact on corporate performance.
Those writing from a critical perspective have focused much of their attention on the business approach to HRM. General concerns about the nature of HRM and its implications for workers can be variously captured in distinctions between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ HRM (Storey 1987), between a ‘high road’ and a ‘low road’ approach (Milkman 1997) and between a more American uni-tarist perspective and a European pluralist perspective (Guest 1994; Strauss 2001). The assumption is that one is potentially better from a worker’s perspective than the other.
Two main kinds of criticism are typically directed at management. The first is that managers too often take the low road, seeking efficient exploitation of human resources rather than acting in partnership with workers in what the Americans might term a ‘mutual gains’ model (Kochan & Osterman 1995). In other words, they fail to implement the sort of HRM that might engage the commitment of workers. A second and more subtle criticism, raised in particular by a number of British writers, is that even where a high road appears to be pursued, it is often largely a sham and reflects little more than the subtle use of HRM techniques to support a careful but essentially manipulative management of organisational culture (Legge 1995; Keenoy 1997). As a result, workers may feel committed and involved, but they do so at the price of greater effort and at some cost in terms of personal stress and quality of life. Either way, the implication is that HRM exploits workers. However, as noted elsewhere (Guest 1999), this critique has been presented without much evidence about how workers react to HRM.
In seeking to understand how HRM may affect performance and develop a critical perspective which might be considered to reflect a worker-oriented per-spective, workers need to be placed centre-stage in the analysis of HRM. This implies that while we can retain an interest in managerial outcomes, we need to build into the analysis a stronger focus on employee-centred outcomes that may or may not relate to corporate performance. The main aims of this paper are, therefore, to extend our ideas about the focus of research on HRM to incorpor-ate a worker-oriented perspective, explore the role of worker attitudes and behaviour as intervening variables in the HRM-performance relationship and identify the kind of HRM practices most likely to be associated with positive worker outcomes.
THREE DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ONHRM AND PERFORMANCE
of strategic contingencies and of a resource-based view of people management, only limited progress can be made if we remain unclear about the forms of HRM that may be linked to particular business strategies. It is possible to identify three dominant approaches in defining the key way in which HRM might enhance corporate performance, namely the high performance work system, the high commitment system and the strategic fit model. After reviewing the relevant evidence about the role of the worker in these various models of the HRM-performance relationship, a later section will develop what can be provisionally termed a worker-friendly system. One implication of these distinctions is that HRM becomes a broad generic term used to describe a range of possible perspectives.
High performance work systems
The concept of a high performance work system covers a number of different approaches. In The New American Workplace, Appelbaum and Batt (1994) identified two main approaches in production systems. One was top-down quality driven; the other more bottom-up and employee-centred. The former is associated with the Japanese-influenced lean production system, the latter builds on an industrial relations tradition that emphasises some notion of partnership between management and unions and has been captured in many respects in Kochan and Osterman’s (1995) ‘mutual gains model’. Appelbaum and Batt write in general terms about the role of HRM but they spell out three main areas that need to be addressed. These are selection, training and compensation and their role is largely to support what could be termed a high involvement, high discretion work system.
MacDuffie (1994) takes this analysis a step further. He distinguishes between the production system, work system and human resource system and makes the important argument that they should each form coherent bundles of mutually reinforcing practices. He also theorises about the key components of a bundle of human resource practices based on what amounts to a variant of expectancy theory. This suggests that high discretionary effort will be a product, firstly, of workers’ skills and abilities, leading to an emphasis on selection and more particularly training; secondly, of motivation, which requires incentives and notably an appropriate financial reward system; and thirdly, of sufficient autonomy and discretion, which will be a function of work systems design. Issues relating to job design, involvement and quality are seen by MacDuffie as part of the work system.
by most of these writers, most notably by Appelbaum and Batt, that workers themselves may have different priorities, reflected in the case for a mutual gains model, the primary focus of HR policy is on creating the conditions where the social system will support the technical system. Worker concerns are not a top priority and the starting point is the technical rather than the social system.
High commitment model
In some important respects, this manufacturing model can be contrasted with a high commitment approach to HRM. This has rather different roots in analyses of changing values and the need to engage or re-engage workers in their work organisations and has been presented by writers such as Walton (1985), Lawler (1986) and even Peters and Waterman (1982). Importantly, their analysis is presented as relevant to all workplaces and in this sense offers a universalistic model. Behind this approach to HRM lie a set of complex and not always coherent arguments. One theme is that the traditional systems of control no longer succeed in attracting, retaining and motivating the kind of workforce many organisations need to compete effectively. At the same time, it is suggested that expectations among an increasingly well-educated workforce are rising and values relating to the centrality of work are changing, an argument that finds some resonance in concepts such as Generation X (Tulgan 1996). As Walton in particular has argued, there is therefore a need to move away from a top-down command and control model to one based on high involvement and reciprocal commitment. This reciprocal commitment implies a new kind of psychological contract (Rousseau 1995) based on trust, fairness of treatment and delivery of promises and therefore requires sophisticated human resource management. In practice, this approach can entail applying to the whole workforce a set of practices that in the past had been restricted to managerial and professional workers. Part of the inspiration for this model in the 1980s was Japan with its distinctive employment system emphasising, among other things, training, security, internal labour markets and team-working. Peters and Waterman (1982), Ouchi (1981) and others offered a distinctively American version of this, drawing partly on elements of the human relations tradition and driven by an emphasis on the importance of managing organisational culture to ensure high commitment.
& Stewart 1992). While these criticisms have some force, there are still questions about whether or not working under these conditions is preferable to more traditional alternatives. There is no doubt that it is very much a management-controlled system within which the apparent emphasis on the human side of enterprise serves the interests of the organisation first and foremost. This raises questions about where the balance of advantage lies in any debate about the mutual gains to be derived from this system (Guest & Peccei 2001).
Strategic fit model
The third approach to HRM and performance is primarily concerned with strategic fit. Its roots lie in the strategic contingencies literature and to some extent, in the work of institutional economists. Part of the analysis, drawing on Barney (1991; 1995) and others, is that effective utilisation of human resources provides perhaps the major source of sustainable competitive advantage. The key to this is to manage the fit between the business strategy and the human resource strategy (Miles & Snow 1984); the empirical challenge is then to demonstrate that those who achieve this strategic fit will also gain superior performance. The research of Huselid (1995), Delery and Doty (1996) and others fits within this perspective. Given the focus on external fit, the role of workers is largely neglected (though Becker et al.1997, have speculated about applying the expectancy model) and the precise HR practices are not clearly specified. This is overcome by setting out core areas of practice, typically selection, development, appraisal and reward. An alternative is to draw on the work of institutional economists such as Lazear (1995) who focus on a relatively narrow set of traditional core issues such as training and incentives. Because of this uncertainty about the nature of HRM, practices identified by Huselid and Delery and Doty are the product of factor analysis and display a relative lack of coherence. Ironically, their research shows a stronger association between performance and a universalistic internal fit model than with external or strategic fit. Not surprisingly, there have been attempts, reflected for example in the work of Wright and Snell (1998), to give this general perspective more conceptual coherence. Despite this, the role of the worker in the HRM-performance model remains unclear and the approach is almost silent about the concerns of workers.
by critics of HRM. To begin to answer it, we need to build the worker back into HRM.
IMPLICATING AND INTEGRATING THE WORKER IN THE
HRM-PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP
There are two main ways of building the worker into HRM. One is to focus explicitly on worker outcomes and is explored later in this paper. The second builds the worker into the HRM-performance relationship. This extends the model from a simple analysis of the relationship between human resource management, however it is represented, and aspects of organisational performance to one in which employee attitudes and behaviour are viewed as a key mediator of this relationship. There is a strong implication in building the worker into the analysis in this way that a positive association between HRM and per-formance depends partly on workers responding positively to their experience of HRM.
A limited number of studies have explicitly incorporated workers’ attitudes and behaviour into analyses of the relationship between HRM and performance. As implied in the preceding analysis, these focus primarily on commitment-based attitudes or behaviour associated with discretionary effort. As such, they differ from research on employee satisfaction and wellbeing. On the other hand, if a set of HR practices was found to be associated both with high performance and employee satisfaction/wellbeing, then we would be closer to making progress in the search for the elusive happy and productive worker (Staw 1986).
One of the original reasons for the rise of interest in the concept of organis-ational commitment was the persistent inability to find a strong association between satisfaction and performance (Iafaldano & Muchinsky 1985). What was needed was a more organisation-centred and potentially more stable concept and commitment to the organisation seemed to offer this promise. However, after more than two decades of research, organisational commitment appears to be no more strongly associated with performance than job satisfaction, though both show a consistent association with lower labour turnover (Mathieu & Zajac 1990; Meyer & Allen 1997). This second result provides a rationale for the view that the goals of HRM might be defined in terms of commitment, quality and flexibility (Guest 1987). Where these are achieved, the performance will come from the quality and flexibility of workers rather than their commitment. Despite consistently high correlations between satisfaction and commitment, most analyses indicate that they are distinct factors. Given apparently similar conse-quences, a key question will therefore be whether they appear to have different antecedents. Meanwhile, in the discourse of human resource management, it is the concept of commitment that has assumed the dominant position, presumably reflecting the primacy given to management concerns. In other words, organis-ational commitment is important mainly because it increases the chance of retaining workers and persuading them to accept change rather than because it leads to more satisfied or motivated workers.
model. Both in practice adopt some variant on expectancy theory (Vroom 1964; Lawler 1971). The high performance work system model, with its manufacturing-oriented production focus, emphasises the importance of discretionary effort and, therefore, proposes that HRM will be linked to performance via the positive exercise of discretionary effort by motivated and well-trained workers. Scope for autonomy together with an appropriate incentive scheme should lead to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for workers. On the other hand, as critics have noted, it might also lead to intensification of work and higher levels of stress. The commitment model emphasises the importance of developing a sense of identity through involvement in a shared activity and shared organisational goals. It argues that the goal of HRM is to ensure committed and competent workers. The commitment comes through the processes of investment in workers reflected in HR practices such as training and development and information sharing as well as through a careful management of organisational culture. Committed workers can then be trusted to exercise ‘responsible autonomy’ and to be moti-vated towards organisational goals thereby contributing to corporate performance. Again, there may be costs in terms of work pressures and possibly competing commitments.
One of the very few major American studies to incorporate an employee perspective has been reported by Appelbaum et al.(2000). Their study compared the effects of high performance work systems in three manufacturing sectors, steel, clothing and medical products, collecting data from almost 4000 workers. They found consistent evidence of a positive association between greater use of various practices and positive employee outcomes. The practices they focused on included autonomy over task-level decision-making, membership of self-directed production and off-line teams, communication with people outside the work group, training and development for skill enhancement and financial incentives for motivation. The employee outcomes were measures of trust, intrinsic satisfaction, commitment, general job satisfaction and stress. In particular, they found a consistent positive association between their core ‘opportunity to participate’ measure, which they see as central to the notion of a high performance work system, and each of the four positive worker-related outcomes. In addition, they find a modest negative association between opportunity to participate and job stress. They conclude by way of summary:
Our results . . . suggest that HPWSs do affect worker attitudes, and that these effects are generally positive ones. We find little, if any, support for the view that these systems have a ‘dark side’, at least as far as negative worker attitudes are concerned (p. 202).
tested nor claimed. However, what is claimed on the basis of these findings is that a high performance work system is good for both the organisation and its employees.
Research that tests more explicitly for the role of worker attitudes and behaviour in the HRM-performance relationship has been reported in the UK. In particular, there has been analysis of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey which, for the first time, and following the Australian model, incorpor-ated an employee survey. Ramsay et al.(2000) have reported a thorough test of various competing explanations of the relationship between HR practices, employee attitudes and corporate performance. They distinguish three HR systems, derived from factor analysis of the large number of practices and pro-cedures covered in the survey. System 1 covers mainly traditional employment relations including representation, consultation committees, equal opportunities and family-friendly practices; System 2 covers items such as grievance procedures, formal teams, training and downward communication; System 3, labelled High Performance Work Practices since in their view it appears to come closest to this, includes profit-related pay, employee consultation, team autonomy, job control, total quality management, upward communication and job security.
Their analysis shows some support for an association between High Performance Work Practices and management ratings of workplace performance and some association between these same practices and worker reports of higher job discretion, commitment, pay satisfaction, good worker–management relations and perceived job security but also higher reported job strain. There was little support for any link between Systems 1 and 2 and performance. A regression analysis including the High Performance Work Practices and employee responses showed that both the practices and commitment were associated with higher labour productivity, financial performance, product/service quality and lower labour turnover. Positive employee–management relations were associated with labour productivity. This implies some support for the model, despite the absence of a significant association between job discretion and outcomes. However, the authors are cautious about accepting this as support for a mediation model since the size effects of commitment are small. They extend their analysis to explore a labour process model. The only evidence that might support it was the associ-ation between a High Performance Work System and job strain. In contrast, System 1, which contains the more formal elements of an employment relations system, was the most likely to be associated with negative employee outcomes.
inter-correlated. On this basis, they do find that the commitment/satisfaction measure acts as a mediator between their measure of HR practices and ratings of establishment level performance.1It should be emphasised that these results do not contradict those of Ramsay et al. The samples and the variables used differ somewhat, as does the method of analysis. The results obtained by Ramsay and his colleagues, particularly with respect to the role of commitment, are significant in the same direction as those reported by Guest et al. On this basis, and with the provisos about cross-sectional data and small size effects, there is some indication that employee commitment and satisfaction are associated with higher workplace performance. The findings fit a model suggesting that HRM has an effect on workers’ attitudes and behaviour and that it is through this that it has part of its effect on performance. In addition, Guest et al.found evidence in their private sector sample of an additional direct link between the number of HR practices reported by managers and their reports of workplace performance.
Further support for the possible mediating role of employee attitudes and behaviour can be found in the longitudinal analysis of HRM and performance in a set of manufacturing organisations reported by Patterson et al.(1997). They collected data from employees as well as extensive information on HR practices and various performance indicators over several years. They were able to show that firms adopting a greater number of HR practices had superior performance. They also showed that HR practices appeared to be more impor-tant in improving performance than investment, research and development and various other general factors. In addition, they found a link between aggregate measures across the workforce of both satisfaction and commitment and higher corporate performance. Since commitment and satisfaction are both linked to HR practices (and, in this study, very highly inter-correlated), it appears that HR practices affect both employee and organisational outcomes and that the relationship between HRM and performance is at least partially mediated by employee attitudes and behaviour.
Bringing these studies together, they present a reasonably consistent picture. While the analysis and conceptual framework presented by Ramsay et al.(2000) is sceptical about the role of high performance work practices, the results are still supportive of a modest mediating role. This is reinforced in the analyses presented by Guest et al. and Patterson et al. What all the studies show is that HR practices associated with high performance work practices, and centering around job design, are related to both superior performance, as rated by managers, and higher satisfaction and commitment, as rated by workers. There is also some evidence that on a longitudinal basis, and using actual financial performance data rather than management estimates, they are linked to firm performance, at least in the manufacturing sector.
HRM, WORKER SATISFACTION AND WELLBEING
Guest and Conway (1999), based on a survey of 1000 UK workers, were able to show that the presence of more from a list of conventional HRM practices, as reported by workers, was associated with higher levels of satisfaction. This study also explored alternatives such as a more traditional union-oriented indus-trial relations environment or contexts where personnel practices were either very limited or of a more traditional human relations/paternalistic type. The evidence clearly showed that workers were more satisfied where more HRM practices were in place. In some cases, workers reported both a large number of HR practices and a strong union presence. The presence of the HR practices rather than the union had the major positive influence on levels of job satisfaction. This fits with the finding of Ramsay et al. (2000) that high performance work systems were more likely than their System 1 bureaucratic practices, including union recognition, to be associated with positive worker outcomes. The fact that the WERS study reaches this conclusion based on general management accounts of HR practices while Guest and Conway base it on workers’ accounts of HR practices suggests that the finding is quite robust.
This analysis was developed further in a paper by Guest (1999) which addressed some of the critics of HRM by again showing, on the basis of data from surveys of random samples of UK workers, that whether or not HRM might be con-strued as manipulative, it was consistently preferred by workers to circumstances in which few HR practices were present.
There is a large body of indirect evidence about employee attitudes to aspects of HRM. For example, there have been a number of studies suggesting that workers respond negatively and may become more dissatisfied when they experience performance-related pay and where other aspects of performance management are introduced (see for example, Marsden & Richardson 1994). There are numerous case studies of poorly introduced initiatives dealing with specific HR practices which provide evidence for those who are critical of HRM (see for example, Mabey et al.1998). However, most of these cases focus on a specific practice rather than an attempt to introduce a coherent set of HR practices. One of the features common to all approaches to HRM is that it should be built around a coherent approach and some notion of strategic integration. In other words, these poorly received, narrowly based initiatives cannot reason-ably be described as human resource management.
What the few reported studies emphasise are worker outcomes within the con-text of work. This is understandable and to some extent inevitable but one of the issues that needs to be considered, especially where levels of organisational commitment are so high that they may encourage workers to spend long hours at work, is how the experience of work relates to life outside work. In other words, we need evidence about both job satisfaction and life satisfaction. These wider worker-centred outcomes were explored in the study described in the next section.
FURTHER EVIDENCE ONHRM, WORK SATISFACTION AND LIFE SATISFACTION
the second successive year, this survey was extended to cover 2000 workers including sub-samples from central government, local government and the health service, resulting in 500 workers from each of these sectors as well as a further 500 from the private sector (Guest & Conway 2001). The data are collected through telephone interviews. Care is taken to ensure that a representative sample is obtained from each of the sectors.
The survey requested information from each worker about human resource practices they might either have experienced themselves in the past year (e.g. training and development or participation in employee involvement activities) or knew currently applied in their workplace (e.g. an explicit promise of no com-pulsory redundancy or procedures to ensure equal opportunities and deal with harassment). Since these are all presented as dichotomous variables, they are not appropriate for factor analysis and the normal procedure has been to count the number reported by each worker. This provides one basis for analysis. However, if we are interested in identifying which practices or which approach to HRM is associated with particular worker outcomes, then it makes sense to treat each practice as a separate variable. Each was therefore turned into a dummy variable for the purposes of analysis. The full set of practices and the extent to which they were experienced or reported as being in place is shown in Table 1.
Table 1 shows the results for each sub-sector and the total sample. One sur-prise is the consistently high indication of the presence of some of the practices and policies. Several of these are what might be described as conventional human resource or employment relations practices of the sort often promoted and endorsed by trade unions rather than those associated with a distinctive high performance or high commitment system. There is some consistency in the presence of these practices across sectors and only near the bottom of the list do marked variations begin to emerge. When the combined set of practices is considered, after controlling for other factors the results show that significantly more are reported to be in place in central government than elsewhere, while the private sector reports significantly more than health and local government (Guest & Conway 2001).
The survey contained a number of items covering aspects of work and life satisfaction. Responses were provided on a ten-point scale from extremely dissatisfied (1) to extremely satisfied (10). For the purposes of this study, they were separated into two overlapping groups. Group 1 contains three items concerned with broad aspects of work-related satisfaction, namely satisfaction with work, with the employer and work–life balance. Group 2 contains six items concerned with life satisfaction. Satisfaction with work and with work–life balance have been retained because they are assumed to be relevant to life satisfaction. To these are added items about satisfaction with health, finances, friends and family and life in general. The Cronbach alpha tests of reliability of the scales based on these two sets of items are .75 and .74 respectively. Scores on each of the items for the total sample and sub-groups is shown in Table 2.
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Question Response (% saying ‘yes’)
Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Does your organisation actively carry out equal opportunity practices in
the workplace? 97 91 95 92 94
Does your organisation take any active steps to prevent any kind of
harassment or bullying for people like you? 93 86 91 85 89 Does your organisation keep you well informed about business issues and
about how well it is doing? 92 80 85 81 85
During the past 12 months, has your organisation provided you with any training and development, such as on-the-job training or some sort of course
or planned activity, to update your skills? 90 85 87 67 82 Does your organisation have a stated policy of deliberately avoiding
compulsory redundancies and lay-offs? 80 77 72 57 72 Have you received a formal performance appraisal during the past year? 95 62 58 56 68 Has your organisation provided any support that helps employees deal with
non-work responsibilities? These are sometimes termed family-friendly policies, such as child-care facilities, counselling for non-work problems
and financial planning. 79 65 78 38 65
Is there any serious attempt in your organisation to make the jobs of people
like you as interesting and varied as possible? 63 58 68 68 64 When new positions come up in middle and senior levels of management,
does your organisation normally try to fill them with people from inside
(or outside) the organisation? 57 21 36 55 42
Some organisations are trying to get employees more involved in workplace decision-making using things like self-directed work teams, total quality management, quality circles, or involvement programmes.
Have you been personally involved in any during the past 12 months? 36 40 40 35 38 Is your pay related to your personal performance in any way through some
industry slightly more satisfied with the work-related items. It is also interesting to note that overall, there is a significant positive correlation between the number of HR practices reported and levels of satisfaction (0.24 with work satis-faction and 0.15 with life satissatis-faction; P= <0.001 in both cases). However, central government workers report the highest number of HR practices, with particularly strong endorsement of performance-related pay and appraisals, and also some of the lowest levels of satisfaction. This suggests that in central government there is either a problem with the greater emphasis on aspects of performance management or a problem of delivering the commitments embedded in the practices. It also points to the need for some caution in generalising about an association between HRM and employee satisfaction.
The core aim of this analysis is to determine the relationship between specific HR practices and aspects of satisfaction at work and in life as a whole. Surveys have generally ignored satisfaction in favour of commitment as a worker out-come and almost all studies have neglected satisfaction beyond the boundaries of work. To ensure that the results do not reflect specific characteristics of individuals or organisations above and beyond the HR practices, we introduced a range of control variables. These are set out in Tables 3 and 4. They include a number of individual background items of the sort normally used in work-related surveys. In addition, we have added a number of items that might affect life satisfaction such as marital status and dependent children. Organisational characteristics are more limited, and refer mainly to size. Sector is built into the analysis. However, we have also added two further items. One is a set of indi-cators of organisational climate. Since the informal work context is an impor-tant component of the commitment-based models of HRM, it seemed sensible to incorporate this element. It is impractical to measure organisational culture in a short survey, so we used a simple measure of climate based on a set of descrip-tive characteristics. These were factor analysed and in both the 2000 and 2001 surveys revealed three descriptive factors that we have labelled friendly, dynamic and bureaucratic dimensions of organisational climate. The friendly climate includes words such as trusting, supportive, fair-minded and public-spirited. A dynamic climate includes words such as innovative, cutting-edge and forward-looking. And a bureaucratic climate is described with words such as formal,
Table 2 Work and life satisfaction
Satisfaction with Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Your employer 6.21 6.43 6.68 7.12 6.61 Your work 6.51 6.99 7.16 7.20 6.97 The balance between work
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Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Personal and organisational background
Age – – 12* 15** 07**
Educational level – – –10* – –08**
Divorced – –08* – – –04*
Dependent children –11* – – – –
Ethnic ‘minority’ –08+ – – 11** –
Tenure – – –09+ – –
Trade union member – – – – –05*
Organisation size 08+ – – –12** –06**
Establishment size –08+ – – –08+ –
Part of management – – – –11* –06*
Hours worked – –17* – – –11***
Full-time – 09+ – – –
Human resource practices
Equal opportunity practices 08+ – – 09* 06**
Anti-harassment practices 11* 10* – – 05*
Workers kept informed – 08+ 07+ – 06**
Training and development – – 08+ – –
No compulsory redundancies – – – 08+ –
Performance appraisal – – – – –
Family-friendly practices 08+ – 11** – 06**
Challenging/interesting jobs 15** 21*** 11* 20*** 17***
Vacancies filled from within 08* – – – –
Employee involvement activities 07+ – – – –
HRM,
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349
Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Work experience and perceptions
Direct participation – 12** – – 07**
Friendly climate 32*** 25*** 28*** 27*** 28***
Dynamic climate 07+ 16*** – 11** 09***
Bureaucratic climate – – – –08+ –
Job alternatives available 08+ – 08+ – 06**
n = 500 500 500 500 2000
Adj R2 .28 .33 .32 .32 .31
R2 .34 .38 .37 .38 .32
F 5.47*** 7.00*** 7.15*** 7.14*** 23.14***
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Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Personal and organisational background
Age – – – 12* –
Educational level – –09+ –13* – –10***
Gender (male) –10* – – – –
Single –16** –08+ – – –09***
Divorced –09* –12** – – –08***
Dependent children –14** –10* – – –07**
Ethnic ‘minority’ –08+ – – – –
Tenure – – – 10* –
Hours worked – –16* – – –08**
Full-time –13* – – – –
Fixed-term contract – – – – –
Multiple job holder – 07+ – – –
Part of management – –13* – –15** –08**
Human resource practices
Equal opportunity practices – – – 08+ –
Anti-harassment practices – 08+ – – –
Workers kept informed – 07+ – – 05*
Training and development – – – – –
No compulsory redundancies 07+ – – 09* –
Performance appraisal – – – – –
Family-friendly practices – – – – –
Challenging/interesting jobs – 12** – 17** 10***
HRM,
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351
Central govt Local govt Health Industry Total
Employee involvement activities – – – – –
Performance-related pay –08+ 19** – 07+ –
Work experience and perceptions
Direct participation 07+ 11** 09+ – 07**
Friendly climate 23*** 13* 18*** 17** 18***
Dynamic climate – – – – –
Bureaucratic climate – –08+ 10* – –
Job alternatives available 15** 08+ 13** 08+ 11***
n= 500 500 500 500 2000
Adj R2 .18 .20 .14 .16 .15
R2 .25 .27 .21 .23 .17
F 3.62*** 4.07*** 3.22*** 3.51*** 9.97***
rule-bound and bureaucratic. The other variables cover direct participation, which Appelbaum et al(2000) found to be associated with job satisfaction; and ease of finding another job at least as good as the present one. This is an indication of security in the labour market that extends job security beyond possible promises of no compulsory redundancies.2
The HR practices and background variables were entered into a regression analysis, first, using the measure of work satisfaction and, second, the measure of life satisfaction as the dependent variable. The results after all the items were entered are shown in Tables 3 and 4. Given the rather idiosyncratic results for the central government workers, we have included the analysis by sector as well as for the sample as a whole. However, it should be noted that sector does not appear as an independent variable in the analysis of the full sample because in the regression analysis it was not significantly associated with either outcome.
We can start by examining the results in relation to work satisfaction. These show that one HR practice, the deliberate attempt to make jobs as interesting and varied as possible, is strongly and consistently associated with higher work satisfaction across all four sectors. For the sample as a whole, a set of practices of the sort rarely identified in the literature on HRM and performance are also significantly associated with higher work satisfaction. These are keeping people well informed about developments, equal opportunities, practices to limit harassment at work and family-friendly practices. It is notable that performance management items such as performance appraisals, performance-related pay and even training and development do not feature as practices associated with work satisfaction. This suggests that with the exception of the job design measure, the practices associated with work satisfaction are those often emphasised by unions and reluctantly acceded to by organisations, rather than those emphasised in any models of the HRM-performance relationship.
One of the features of the analysis is the importance of the climate measures. It appears that a friendly work climate is very strongly and consistently associ-ated with work satisfaction. So too is working in a dynamic climate in all sectors apart from health. The positive association between scope for direct participation and work satisfaction reinforces the importance of job design. Together with the significant role of information provision, it lends further support to the impor-tance of the high performance work system emphasised by Appelbaum et al(2000). The significant result for perceived employment alternatives suggests that employ-ment security and the notion of employability is important to some workers. There are a number of associations between work satisfaction and background factors. For example, long hours are associated with lower satisfaction; so too is being part of management and having higher educational qualifications. It is important to bear in mind that this sample is biased towards the public sector and contains a high proportion of well-educated professional workers in areas such as teaching and nursing.3In showing that it is those who are better educated, part of management and work long hours that are less satisfied, the results challenge some popular assumptions.
described in terms of providing challenging and interesting work, again emerges as significantly associated with life satisfaction for the whole sample along with the practice of keeping workers informed. Direct participation and a friendly climate are also associated with life satisfaction. The presence of perceived job alternatives is associated with life satisfaction, perhaps as an indicator of the impor-tance of employment security for overall wellbeing. It is more important for life satisfaction than for work satisfaction and is significantly associated with life satisfaction in every sector.
As we might expect, a number of more personal variables are associated with life satisfaction. They fall into two groups. In the first, having higher educational qualifications, longer hours and being part of management are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction. They are also associated with lower work satis-faction but two of the three size effects have increased slightly suggesting that the effects at work spill over into life outside work. The second group shows that workers who are single, divorced/separated or have dependent children are less satisfied than those who are married but with no dependent children. The sources of dissatisfaction may be different for those with dependent children. It is notable that those who are divorced are also more dissatisfied with work suggesting a rather different kind of spill-over. Leaving these issues aside, it appears that in this sample, HR practices have only a limited direct association with life satis-faction.
In a separate analysis of the same data, we found that a measure of the state of the psychological contract, defined, from an employee perspective, as per-ceptions of whether the organisation has kept its promises and met its obligations, whether they are fair and whether management can be trusted to keep them in the future, mediates the relationship between the number of HR practices in place and both work and life satisfaction. It therefore provides a form of cognitive evalu-ation of the HR practices and related policies and practices. Workers in central government were most likely to report a poor state of the psychological con-tract. This suggests that the presence of HR practices is not enough. Effective delivery of those practices that have particular salience for workers is possibly more important. Workers do not passively accept HR practices but actively evaluate and respond to them. Failure by management to deliver on promises implied in HR policies and practices is likely to lead to a negative evaluation and in such circumstances, as the case of central government workers illustrates, the association between the presence of more HR practices and work satisfaction breaks down.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
and conceptual literature, it rarely includes accounts from workers of their reactions to broader HRM programs proposed by advocates of HRM. Therefore, while it may express legitimate concerns about what HRM might do to workers, it does so in the absence of a worker’s voice. This stream of work is dominated by UK writers with some support in mainland Europe and Australia. The typical conclusion is that HRM is bad for workers; however, preferable alternatives are rarely suggested.
The second stream has been far more concerned with the relationship between HRM and corporate performance. Predictably, it has been heavily criticised by those within the first group (see for example, Legge 2000). An embedded assump-tion is that what is good for business is also good for workers. This approach is dominated by American writers although there is a strong presence in the UK and a rather smaller one in mainland Europe, Australia and elsewhere. While researchers in this group may sometimes make assumptions about the role of workers in the HRM-performance relationship, their work invariably ignores them. Nevertheless, it is the work of writers in this group that has formed the point of departure for the present analysis.
The core argument in this paper is that we need to open up a third approach to the study of HRM, which might be termed a worker-centred or worker-friendly approach, which locates the worker at the heart of the analysis. An attempt has been made to begin this by addressing some of the concerns expressed by both groups of researchers and writers on HRM described above. With respect to the former, it explores workers’ reports of their work and life satisfaction and how these relate to their experience of HRM. The analysis presented here is relatively crude but it does show a positive association between workers’ reports of the presence of certain HR practices and their work and life satisfaction. With respect to the second group, the analysis seeks to implicate the worker in the relationship between HRM and performance. It is argued that only by doing so will we begin to gain a better understanding of why HRM does or does not affect performance. At the same time, the analysis recognises the diversity of approaches to HRM and performance and begins to explore the relative merits of each with respect to worker outcomes.
The analysis of the role of workers in the HRM-performance relationship pro-vides some support for a model in which worker attitudes and behaviour serve as a partial mediator. The limited evidence suggests that the same practices are associated with higher worker satisfaction and appear to fit both the high per-formance work system and the high commitment models. The results suggest that the way workers respond to the HR initiatives, reflected perhaps in the concept of the state of the psychological contract, is linked to their performance and through this to organisational outcomes. In developing HR practices to enhance performance, organisations therefore need to consider explicitly the response of workers.
infor-mation provision are associated with both higher work satisfaction and higher life satisfaction. Evidence from the data presented in this paper shows that in addition to practices associated with high performance work systems, a set of more bureaucratic worker-oriented practices are also associated with higher work satisfaction. These include family-friendly, equal opportunity and anti-harassment practices. By implication, organisations need to focus on both to attract a positive worker response. Wood (1999) has argued that family-friendly practices fall into a different cluster to the high performance work practices and these findings remind us that HRM concerns more than high performance.
Equally interesting are the practices that are not associated with worker satisfaction. HR practices associated with performance management are less well received. Performance appraisal shows no association with satisfaction in any group. Performance-related pay also shows no association with work satisfaction. It has a more complicated association with life satisfaction. Among central government workers, where 80 per cent report that they experience performance-related pay, it is weakly associated with greater life dissatisfaction. However, in local government, where only 20 per cent experience performance-related pay, the picture is reversed. Closer analysis reveals that many of the teachers, who make up a large proportion of this group, received a significant pay award, nominally presented as performance-related, and this was linked to a more positive assessment of satisfaction with finances that formed a component of life satisfaction.
Training and development, which can form an important element of a resource-based model, shows little link to satisfaction. Similarly, employee involvement activities, filling vacancies from within and a stated policy of avoiding compulsory redundancies, all of which can be seen as part of a high commitment model, also show little or no association with work or life satisfaction.
Looking beyond work satisfaction, we need much more evidence about worker wellbeing. The findings of Appelbaum et al.(2000) and Ramsay et al.(2000) on the relationship between high performance work systems and employee stress are somewhat contradictory. However, the evidence linking longer hours, as well as managerial responsibilities to lower satisfaction both at work and in life as a whole, is some indication that the demands of work and more work overload are not conducive to general wellbeing. As we might expect, HR practices have a rather more tenuous link to satisfaction outside work. Yet job design and direct participation were positively associated with life satisfaction in the survey results suggesting that these should form the core of a more worker-friendly model of HRM.
Peccei (2001) confirms that a form of partnership that emphasises a range of HR practices, job design and direct participation is associated with higher organis-ational performance. While much depends on the balance of advantage within a partnership or mutual gains system, it appears to offer a context in which a range of policies and practices associated with work and life satisfaction for workers and higher performance for the organisation can effectively be implemented.
NOTES
1. The analysis also found two factors providing acceptable measures of workers’ influence over the task and their perceptions of the extent to which they were consulted. We might expect the measure of task influence, which covered how the work was conducted, the pace at which it was conducted and the range of tasks, to correspond in some respects to elements of a high performance work system. In the event, it was not significantly associated in the regression analyses with the number of human resource practices in place in either the public or private sectors. On the other hand, perceived consultation was strongly associated with a greater number of HR practices in both sectors. It was also associated with lower ratings by management of both comparative productivity and quality of goods and services.
2. There was a measure of job security in the survey. Responses were generally very positive in 2001 with over 80 per cent expressing moderate or high levels of job security. It is possible that this has changed as recession appears more likely.
3. Although we do not report an analysis by occupation in this paper, it was notable that teachers, located within the local government sector, stood out as the group most dissatisfied with work (beta -.19*)
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