PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL AND EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE: A LATENT GROWTH MODELING APPROACH

The positive core construct of psychological capital (consisting of efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) has been conceptually and empirically demonstrated to be related to employee performance. However, much of this work has relied on cross‐sectional designs to examine these relationships. This study utilizes longitudinal data from a large financial service organization (N= 179 financial advisory‐type employees) to examine within‐individual change in psychological capital over time and if this change relates to their change in performance. Latent growth modeling analyses revealed statistically significant within‐individual change in psychological capital over time, and that this change in psychological capital was related to change in 2 types of performance outcomes (supervisor‐rated performance and financial performance, i.e., individual sales revenue). Moreover, results of an exploratory cross‐lagged panel analysis suggested a causal relationship such that prior psychological capital leads to subsequent performance rather than vice versa. Taken together, these results highlight the impact employees’ psychological capital may have on their subjectively and objectively measured performance over time and offer evidence‐based practical guidelines for human resource selection, development, and performance management.     

Boundary Conditions of the High‐Investment Human Resource Systems‐Small‐Firm Labor Productivity Relationship

Although a few published, multiindustry, firm‐level, empirical studies have linked systems of high‐investment or high‐performance human resource management practices to enhanced small‐firm performance, this stream of strategic human resource management research is underdeveloped and equivocal. Accordingly, in this study, we use a sample of for‐profit, private‐sector, small Canadian firms with fewer than 100 employees from a variety of industry sectors to examine boundary conditions of the relationship between firm‐level high‐investment human resource systems and objective small‐firm labor productivity. Congruent with contingency theory, this study's results indicate that the extent and nature of the influence of high‐investment human resource systems on objective small‐firm labor productivity is contingent on internal (differentiation strategy and firm capital intensity) and external boundary conditions (industry dynamism and industry growth). Implications and limitations of this research study as well as avenues for future research are discussed.     

Determinants of fraud examination performance: An empirical study of internal investigation reports

Fraud examiners from global auditing firms and local law firms are in the business of private policing by conducting internal investigations in private and public organisations when there is suspicion of financial crime. The business is often characterised by secrecy, and reports of investigations are often difficult or impossible to disclose. Since 2012, we have successfully retrieved 63 fraud examination reports in Scandinavia. Based on these reports, this article presents a statistical analysis of fraud examination performance. Performance was measured in terms of the extent of successful reconstruction of past events and the extent of justification of conclusions from the examinations. We identified three statistically significant determinants of fraud examination performance: the seriousness of the consequences, the relative seriousness of the consequences and the conclusions, and the seriousness of the conclusions.     

Job satisfaction and firm performance: Can employees’ job satisfaction change the trajectory of a firm’s performance?

Contemporary trends in business have focused on enhancing the employee work experience. Proponents argue that doing so will improve employees’ productivity and ultimately the firm's performance. However, critics argue that job satisfaction has only a modest relationship with an employee's job performance, and therefore, such an investment will likely have little impact on the firm's financial performance. To investigate the relationship between employees’ job satisfaction and firm performance, we collected a sample of 404 employees working in 31 firms. We tested this relationship using latent growth modeling which allows us to latently examine how employees’ job satisfaction at one time point can predict the trajectory of firm performance. Study results indicated that job satisfaction predicted a positive linear change in two financial indices of firm performance (i.e., return on assets and return on equity) over the course of four years when controlling for three indicators of firm size. These results suggest that the effects of job satisfaction on firm performance are not immediate but rather take time to manifest.     

the role of new hire orientation programs

A vital component of a firm's human resource management is its new hire orientation (NHO) program. The authors' review of extant literature suggests that NHO programs can be organized based on a reconceptualization of human capital. Using their typology, a firm can organize the role and scope of its NHO program, assign responsibility for the program's execution, and determine the appropriate level of resources to commit to this process. Results of an application in a large technology organization suggest firm performance suffers when NHO components are not aligned strategically. Implications of the study for managers and academics in career counseling are presented.     

Can a Supportive Workplace Impact Employee Resilience in a High Pressure Performance Environment? An Investigation of the Chinese Banking Industry

Resilience is one of the positive emotions that will enhance employees’ ability to cope in adverse conditions, such as work intensification, organisational change, and work stress. Despite growing research interest in the employee resilience area, there is limited knowledge of the process through which critical social support at workplaces, such as supportive leadership and co-worker support, affects employees’ ability to cope in challenging situations. This study, underpinned by the theory of conservation of resources and social cognitive theory, examines the role of supportive leadership and co-worker support in employee resilience, and how this may be moderated by work pressures in the context of the Chinese banking industry. Using a sample of 2,025 Chinese banking workers, we tested four hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that supportive leadership and co-worker support are positively associated with employee resilience. High work pressure moderates the relationship between both supportive leadership and co-worker support and employee resilience, such that the relationship between these conditions is stronger when perceived performance pressure is high. Our study raises important implications for both the theoretical development of employee resilience and for management practices with respect to fostering employee resilience in organisations.     

What Makes Entrepreneurs Happy? Determinants of Satisfaction Among Founders

This study empirically investigates factors influencing satisfaction levels of founders of new ventures, using a representative sample of 1,107 Dutch founders. We relate entrepreneurial satisfaction (with income, psychological burden and leisure time) to firm performance, motivation and human capital. Founders with high levels of specific human capital are more satisfied with income than those with high levels of general human capital. Intrinsic motivation and that of combining responsibilities lowers stress and leads to more satisfaction with leisure time. Women are more satisfied with their income than men, even though they have a lower average monthly turnover.     

Resilience in the Workplace: A Multilevel Review and Synthesis

In an increasingly dynamic business environment, the concept of resilience is fundamental to understanding how employees successfully handle adversity. Yet, the operationalisation of the concept, the factors which lead to its development, and how and why it influences outcomes of interest to organisations are issues still under debate in the literature. In this article, we address these debates by undertaking a critical review of research on resilience in the workplace at both the individual and team levels. We pinpoint different conceptualisations of resilience and highlight how resilience has been measured in extant quantitative work. Further, we provide a systematic literature review of empirical work on the antecedents and outcomes of resilience at the individual and team levels, as well as conduct a review of work that has introduced resilience as a moderator or mediator. In doing so, we highlight theoretical approaches that have been adopted to study resilience in the workplace. Based on our review of the extant empirical work on resilience, we develop a roadmap for future research. In particular, we pinpoint relevant theoretical approaches that help us understand the mechanisms underlying the development and outcomes of resilience and highlight opportunities for empirical advancement of the literature.     

The Evolution of Business: Learning,Innovation, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

This article-as part of a broader evolutionary inquiry toward human fulfillment, societal wellbeing, and environmental sustainability-explores new frontiers for business. In a rapidly changing global environment, corporations can become evolutionary change agents for the creation of a sustainable global civilization by fostering financial, social, and environmental results. The contemporary metaphors used to describe the business world can be limited in times when an emergent paradigm calls for new visions and actions. An evolutionary understanding, grounded in evolutionary systems theory, can open possibilities for leadership and innovation toward sustainability. Complex systems, such as organizations, need to learn to learn in harmony with the dynamics of their milieu in order to co-evolve and create value. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications of the evolutionary paradigm for business education.     

Modeling human performance in statistical word segmentation

The ability to discover groupings in continuous stimuli on the basis of distributional information is present across species and across perceptual modalities. We investigate the nature of the computations underlying this ability using statistical word segmentation experiments in which we vary the length of sentences, the amount of exposure, and the number of words in the languages being learned. Although the results are intuitive from the perspective of a language learner (longer sentences, less training, and a larger language all make learning more difficult), standard computational proposals fail to capture several of these results. We describe how probabilistic models of segmentation can be modified to take into account some notion of memory or resource limitations in order to provide a closer match to human performance.     

Well-Being,Personal Success and Business Performance Among Entrepreneurs: A Two-Wave Study

This two-wave longitudinal study among 121 entrepreneurs in The Netherlands investigated bi-directional relationships between entrepreneurs’ well-being and performance. Results of Smart PLS analyses showed positive well-being at Time 1 (work engagement; life satisfaction; and job satisfaction) predicted subjective entrepreneurial success 2 years later, both as indicated by entrepreneurs’ reports of achieved financial success (including personal income security and wealth, business turn-over, sales and profit growth), as well as perceptions of achieved personal success (personal fulfilment, community impact and employee relations). No relations were found with objective indicators of business performance (profit; turnover; and number of employees) over time. The expected recursive relationship between performance and well-being was only found in the short term; a better objective financial situation immediately preceding the second measurement moment, predicted better well-being at T2. These results are both in line with a well-being–performance (gain) cycle, and the happiness set-point thesis that predicts resilience in the face of events. This paper contributes to the literature by emphasizing the importance of entrepreneurs’ well-being as a key factor in long-term subjective financial and personal entrepreneurial success. The practical implication is that entrepreneurs should maintain and improve their own well-being to achieve positive long term business outcomes.     

Recruiters' Assessment and Use of Social Capital in Résumé Screening1

An experiment was conducted with undergraduate business students to investigate how human resource (HR) recruiters use social capital conceptualized as friendship between applicants and the recruiter in screening résumés. Results showed that social capital influenced recruiters' assessment of applicants above and beyond human capital. In addition, the influence of friendship ties in applicant assessment was more prominent among female HR recruiters than among male recruiters. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed in the context of employee selection.     

Measuring organisational climate and employee engagement: Evidence for a 7 Ps model of work practices and outcomes

This study presents evidence supporting the psychometric properties of the Voice Climate Survey: an employee opinion survey that measures work practices and outcomes. The tool is tested across 13,729 employees from 1,279 business units representing approximately 1,000 organisations. Exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses and internal reliability analyses support 31 lower‐order work practices and outcomes that aggregate into seven higher‐order work systems broadly covering practices and outcomes such as organisational direction, ethics, resources, involvement, recognition, development, teamwork, wellness, work/life balance, change management, customer satisfaction, job satisfaction, organisational commitment and employees' intention to stay. External validation of the tool is demonstrated by linking scores from the employee survey with independent manager reports of turnover, absenteeism, productivity, health and safety, goal attainment, financial performance, change management, innovation and customer satisfaction.     

Common Cultural Relationships in Corporate Governance across Developed and Emerging Financial Markets

This study investigates the corporate governance (CG) practice of business organisations in 43 countries with developed and emerging financial markets from the perspective of cross-cultural psychology. We find significant relationships between CG practice and Hofstede's cultural dimensions, and discover that the cultural dimensions of power distance and uncertainty avoidance significantly explain the development of CG practice. These two cultural dimensions fully capture the power of stock market history to explain the development of CG practice across developed and emerging financial markets, which indicates that cultural factors are more important than the length of stock market history in the development of CG.
Cette étude se propose d'étudier, dans une perspective de psychologie inter-culturelle, la pratique de la gouvernance d'entreprise dans des organismes d'affaire de 43 pays différents dont les marchés financiers sont développés ou émergents. Nous trouvons une relation significative entre la pratique de la gouvernance d'entreprise et les dimensions culturelles de Hofstede. Nous montrons que les dimensions culturelles de distance du pouvoir et d'évitement de l'incertitude expliquent le développement de la pratique de la gouvernance d'entreprise. Ces deux dimensions culturelles déterminent totalement la puissance de l'histoire du marché boursier pour expliquer le développement de la pratique de la gouvernance d'entreprise sur des marchés financiers développés ou émergents. Les facteurs culturels ont donc plus de poids que la durée de l'histoire du marché boursier dans le développement de la pratique de la gouvernance d'entreprise.     

MEASUREMENT ERROR IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN RESOURCES AND FIRM PERFORMANCE: ADDITIONAL DATA AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Gerhart and colleagues (2000) and Huselid and Becker (2000) recently debated the presence and implications of measurement error in measures of human resource practices. This paper presents data from 3 more studies, 1 of large organizations from different industries at the corporate level, 1 from commercial banks, and the other of autonomous business units at the level of the job. Results of all 3 studies provide additional evidence that single respondent measures of HR practices contain large amounts of measurement error. Implications for future research into the HR firm performance relationship are discussed.     

Collaborative healthcare research: Some ethical considerations

This article reviews some of the ethical aspects of collaborative research. Scientific collaboration has known potential benefits but it’s a challenging task to successfully accomplish a collaborative venture on ethically sound grounds. Current trends in international healthcare research collaboration reflect limited benefits for the majority of world population. Research collaboration between scientists of academia and industry usually has financial considerations. Successful cross-cultural and international collaborations have to overcome many regional and global barriers. Despite these difficulties, many scientific collaborations usually begin with an informal meeting or contact. With advancement in global communications, scientists have greater responsibility towards the world community while considering the impact of their collaborative partnerships. I review the basic factors that are required for forging a collaborative partnership and responsible attitudes to sustain the relationship. Finally I conclude that scientists in healthcare research can play important roles beyond collaborations and contribute to bringing harmony, resolving differences across the nations and countries in today’s troubled world.     

THE IMPACT OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND WORK CLIMATE ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

This paper examines relationships between human resource management (HRM), work climate, and organizational performance in the branch network of a retail bank. It extends previous research on group-level climate-performance and HRM-performance relationships and examines how climate and HRM function as joint antecedents of business unit performance. Significant correlations are found between work climate, human resource practices, and business performance. The results show that the correlations between climate and performance cannot be explained by their common dependence on HRM factors, and that the data are consistent with a mediation model in which the effects of HRM practices on business performance are partially mediated by work climate.     

A Scale to Measure Perceptions of Organizational Maturity

While there are several standard scales in use for measuring various dimensions of human resource management, research is very limited in terms of scale development for variables that form part of the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM) for organizational maturity. This study covers a perception measurement scale for people governance variables and organizational maturity developed, validated with industry experts and statistically tested. The scale was developed with 113 items grouped into 11 variables covering governance, staffing, performance management, rewards, quality, training, organizational maturity and business outcomes around staff, firm and customer aspects. The reliability analysis was performed for each of the variables based on inputs from 521 respondents across the services industry. The respondents were experienced professionals in functional management and human resources. Detailed analyses of results provide high scores for the variables, indicating good consistency of items. Convergent and discriminant validity analyses were performed for evaluating validation of item dimensions within each of the variables. The overall results indicate that the newly developed scale is a reliable and validated one to measure variables around people, process and organizational maturity, for researchers particularly in the services industry. This fills in a missing gap in terms of a validated scale for measuring people management variables. Further research can be done to extend this scale to other industries and to look at a model fitment across the related variables.     

An empirical examination of the mechanisms mediating between high-performance work systems and the performance of Japanese organizations

The resource-based view of the firm and social exchange perspectives are invoked to hypothesize linkages among high-performance work systems, collective human capital, the degree of social exchange in an establishment, and establishment performance. The authors argue that high-performance work systems generate a high level of collective human capital and encourage a high degree of social exchange within an organization, and that these are positively related to the organization's overall performance. On the basis of a sample of Japanese establishments, the results provide support for the existence of these mediating mechanisms through which high-performance work systems affect overall establishment performance.     

Flexible Work Arrangements Availability and their Relationship with Work‐to‐Family Conflict,Job Satisfaction,and Turnover Intentions: A Comparison of Three Country Clusters

The present study explored the availability of flexible work arrangements (FWA) and their relationship with manager outcomes of job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and work‐to‐family conflict (WFC) across country clusters. We used individualism and collectivism to explain differences in FWA availability across Latin American, Anglo, and Asian clusters. Managers from the Anglo cluster were more likely to report working in organisations that offer FWA compared to managers from other clusters. For Anglo managers, flextime was the only FWA that had significant favorable relationships with the outcome variables. For Latin Americans, part‐time work negatively related with turnover intentions and strain‐based WFC. For Asians, flextime was unrelated to time‐based WFC, and telecommuting was positively associated with strain‐based WFC. The clusters did not moderate the compressed work week and outcome relationships. Implications for practitioners adopting FWA practices across cultures are discussed.