Abstract
Empowerment offers the predominant explanation for why employee perceptions of high-performance managerial practices are positively associated with employee job performance. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we propose that high-performance managerial practices also influence performance because these practices encourage employees to engage in voice. Additionally, we suggest that empowerment and voice together provide a more complete explanation for why high-performance managerial practices and job performance are linked. In essence, we argue that empowerment transmits the effects of high-performance managerial practices to job performance because it engenders voice. Using meta-analysis of primary research consisting of 151 independent samples involving 53,200 employees, we find that not only do empowerment and voice independently transmit the effects of high-performance managerial practices to job performance, but they sequentially mediate this relationship as well. Further, we distinguish among skill-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing high-performance managerial practices to identify when empowerment and voice are more or less effective in explaining associations with job performance. Although empowerment and voice transmit effects of all 3 types of high-performance managerial practices to employee performance, these mechanisms appear to provide the best explanation for the effects of opportunity-enhancing practices, and the primary reason why is because employees respond to opportunity-enhancing practices with voice.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1296-1313 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Journal of Organizational Behavior |
Volume | 39 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2018 |
Keywords
- empowerment
- high-performance managerial practices
- job performance
- voice
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Applied Psychology
- Sociology and Political Science
- General Psychology
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management