Demands or Resources? The Relationship Between HR Practices, Employee Engagement, and Emotional Exhaustion Within a Hybrid Model of Employment Relations

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which employees may experience and respond to tensions inherent in the mix of potentially confl icting human resource (HR) practices that compose hybrid models of employment relations. By drawing on the job demands–resources (JD-R) literature and viewing HR practices as “demands” and “resources,” we explore the impact of performance manage-ment and employee voice practices on employee well-being, as exemplifi ed by engagement and emotional exhaustion, in a large public-sector organization in Ireland. Our fi ndings suggest that employee voice mechanisms may act as a resource in both enhancing engagement and in counterbalancing the demands presented by a performance management system, thus reducing the deleteri-ous effects of emotional exhaustion. Our study extends understanding of hybrid models of human resource management (HRM) and of the ways in which employ-ees manage the contradictory signals that such models may send in terms of performance expectations.