Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 1679: Additive Effects of Performance- and Commitment-Oriented Human Resource Management Systems on Organizational Outcomes (Sustainability)

Exploring the duality and balance research on human resource management (HRM), this study established two different HRM systems or bundles based on distinct guiding principles—the performance-oriented HRM system and the commitment-oriented HRM system. This study investigated whether the performance- and commitment-oriented HRM systems or bundles with different philosophical backgrounds have their own independent and additive effects on organizational outcomes. The relationships between these HRM systems and organizational outcomes were examined with 1735 firm-period samples in the longitudinal setting. The empirical results show that the commitment-oriented HRM systems have independent and additive effects on organizational commitment and human capital. However, the performance-oriented HRM systems have no independent and additive effect on organizational outcomes. Our study also indicates that increasing the performance-oriented HRM practices can be redundant and unnecessary unless firms have sufficiently high levels of the commitment-oriented HRM practices. Given that the definition and measures of commitment-oriented HRM bundles nearly match the characteristics of sustainable HRM, we thus argue that the commitment-oriented HRM systems have more potential to improve not only organizational outcomes and performance, but also human and social sustainability, than the performance-oriented HRM systems.