Human resource management systems and work attitudes: The mediating role of future time perspective

• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Author: Torsten Biemann,Jörg Korff,Sven C. Voelpel
• Date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2110

Human resource management systems and work

attitudes: The mediating role of future time

perspective

JÖRG KORFF

1

*, TORSTEN BIEMANN

1

AND SVEN C. VOELPEL

2

1

Business School, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

2

Department of Business and Economics, Focus Area Diversity, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Summary This paper examines the role of employees’future time perspective (FTP) in the association between human

resource management (HRM) systems and work-related attitudes. Drawing on social exchange theory, signal-

ing theory, and affective events theory, we hypothesize HRM systems’indirect effects on individual-level job

satisfaction and affective organizational commitment as mediated by FTP. The results of this multilevel study,

comprising 913 employees of 76 business units, provide evidence that HRM systems have (i) direct effects on

employees’FTP and (ii) indirect effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment via FTP. In addi-

tion, three HRM bundles’(i.e., knowledge, skills, and abilities enhancing; motivation enhancing; and oppor-

tunity enhancing) corresponding indirect effects are explored. We discuss the results, theoretical contributions,

and practical implications of the study, as well as future research directions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: strategic human resource management; future time perspective; job satisfaction; affective

organizational commitment; cross-level mediation

Introduction

Over the past quarter century, research has demonstrated the positive effects of systems of high-performance work

practices on organizations’performance (e.g., Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, & Kalleberg, 2000; Arthur, 1994; Combs,

Liu, Hall, & Ketchen, 2006). More recently, the processes accounting for the eventual transformation of human re-

source management (HRM) systems into firm performance have gained growing attention in terms of both empirical

investigation (Jiang, Lepak, Hu, & Baer, 2012) and theoretical explanation (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Lepak, Liao,

Chung, & Harden, 2006). As research has increasingly taken the notions of multilevel theory (Kozlowski & Klein,

2000) into account, the mediating role of individual-level processes in the higher-level relations between HRM

systems and unit-level or firm-level performance has explicitly been acknowledged; specifically, job satisfaction

(Messersmith, Patel, & Lepak, 2011; Piening, Baluch, & Salge, 2013) and affective commitment (Gong, Law,

Chang, & Xin, 2009) have been demonstrated to mediate between HRM systems and organizations’performance.

It has been found that the effects of high-performance work systems on workers’job satisfaction and affecti ve

commitment are mediated by establishment-level processes, that is, concern for employees’climate that specifically

captures employees’shared cognitive appraisals of the extent to which organizations value and care about its

employees’well-being (Takeuchi, Chen, & Lepak, 2009).

Takeuchi et al. (2009) relied on managers’assessments of the use of HRM practices in the establishment;

however, such assessments have been shown to vary from employees’perception (Liao, Toya, Lepak, & Hong,

*Correspondence to: Jörg Korff, Business School, University of Mannheim, 68161 Mannheim, Germany. E-mail: joerg.korff@bwl.uni-

mannheim.de

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 21 May 2015

Revised 05 April 2016, Accepted 08 April 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38,45–67 (2017)

Published online 18 May 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2110

Research Article

2009). Indeed, research findings suggest that employees’perceptions of HRM practices play a central role in the

relation between HRM systems and firm performance. For example, workers’attributions about the manage-

ment’s reasons for the adoption of HRM practices have been demonstrated to impact workers’attitudes and,

in turn, unit performance (Nishii, Lepak, & Schneider, 2008). Also, the perceived HRM practice use at the job

group level has been shown to predict workers’affective commitment (Kehoe & Wright, 2013).

In sum, extant literature still lacks a clear understanding of the individual-level processes that turn HRM

systems’effects into employee job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment (for an exception, see

Wu & Chaturvedi, 2009). Individual workers’assessments (i.e., the micro perspective) have largely been ignored

in strategic HRM research (Guest, 2011; Wright & Boswell, 2002). Typically, in strategic HRM research,

individuals are treated as invariably and uniformly responding to HRM systems (Nishii & Wright, 2008). In this

paper, we argue that HRM systems do not, in and of themselves, result in individual-level work attitudes; rather,

they provide their foundation. We combine multiple theoretical lenses (Okhuysen & Bonardi, 2011) and draw on

social exchange theory (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005) and signaling theory (Connelly, Certo, Ireland, & Reutzel,

2011) to assert that HRM systems are perceived and evaluated by employees and, in turn, result in workers’

assessment of their future prospects in the organization. Second, calling upon affective events theory (AET; Weiss

& Cropanzano, 1996), we contend that these resulting workers’perspectives play an important role in the

subsequent formation of work attitudes. More precisely, we propose employees’future time perspective (FTP;

Cate & John, 2007; Lang & Carstensen, 2002) as a mediator in the cross-level association between HRM systems

and workers’job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. FTP is a flexible, cognitive-motivational

construct conceptualized as individuals’“subjective sense of future time”(Carstensen, 2006, p. 1913), which

captures at least two views: “future as a time of opportunities and future as a time of limitations”(Cate & John,

2007, p. 187). By integrating FTP in our research model as an individual-level process that accounts for

employees’emotional experiences (Figure 1), we address calls for research that combine macro and micro

perspectives (Huselid & Becker, 2011; Wright & Boswell, 2002) and that help to better understand the processes

that link HRM and performance (Guest, 2011) and its antecedents (Baltes, Wynne, Sirabian, Krenn, & Lange,

2014). This study considers that “individuals have their own schemas for attending to and processing

information,”which may account for additional variance in the causal chain of strategic HRM (Wright &

Haggerty, 2005, p. 170).

We begin with a review of the extant research to substantiate the significance of FTP, paying particular atten-

tion to its role in organizational research and considering the antecedents and consequences of FTP in the work

context. Building on the resulting hypotheses, we present empirical findings accounting for th e multilevel str uc-

ture of organizational settings. We conclude by discussing the results, theoretical contributions, future research

directions, and practical implications.

Figure 1. Conceptual model

46 J. KORFF ET AL.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 38,45–67 (2017)

DOI: 10.1002/job