An examination of the relationship between frontline employees' perceptions of people management practices and their prosocial service behaviours: a case study of an employee-owned organization

摘要

With a growing body of literature examining HR systems’ influence on organizationalperformance outcomes, there has been a plea for research that examines the underlyingmechanisms that facilitate this in a service setting. This study adopts the notion of peoplemanagement which incorporates the management of HR implementation and line managers’leadership behaviour in its investigation of how HR affects performance. This study, byexamining how frontline employees’ perception of people management practices affectsindividual level prosocial service behaviours, and by using a qualitative approach in datacollection and analysis, offers an explanation of the underlying mechanisms in the causal chain.Furthermore, the setting of this research in an employee-owned organization affords a context-rich account of how HR systems affect individual level performance in a service setting.Thirty one semi-structured interviews were conducted, of which twenty three were conductedwith frontline employees to elicit how their experiences of people management practicesaffected their display of prosocial service behaviours. Eight semi-structured interviews werearranged with frontline managers to offer an alternate perspective to data gathered from theemployees.The research identifies bundles of practices, comprising both “employment” and “workpractices” as instrumental in employees’ display of prosocial service behaviours. The resultsconfirm the AMO framework as being a suitable explanation of mediating mechanisms in theHR-performance chain, whilst not only confirming the presence of a few existing interveninginfluences but also identifying novel factors not previously studied within the HR-performancediscussion. It also demonstrates that adopting multiple theoretical perspectives in investigatingHR-performance relationships offers a more comprehensive picture.Finally, the research confirms the role of the line manager as a protagonist within the HR-performance discussion whilst also demonstrating the significance of co-workers. Theownership context emerges as important in this enquiry – specifically work atmosphere andrelationships – in influencing employees’ service behaviour.