Employee attitudes, HR practices and organizational performance: what’s the evidence?

Abstract

Employee attitude constitutes an important factor of the organizational performance process. In particular, organizational commitment and job satisfaction are the two important employee attitudes that have been commonly studied and empirically assessed in the organizational behaviour and labour economics literature. This literature suggests that positive employee attitudes, such as higher levels of organizational commitment and job satisfaction, are associated with higher levels of financial performance, labour productivity and other related organizational outcomes (e.g. Porter et al., 1974; Mathieu and Zajac, 1990; Ostroff, 1992; Hackett et al., 1994; Swailes, 2002; Schneider et al., 2003; Luchak and Gellatly, 2007; Brown et al., 2010; Suliman and Al-Junaibi, 2010). Hence, it is important to researchers, policy makers and business owners and managers to analyse and implement appropriate human resource (HR) strategies that enhance employee attitudes and workplace perceptions which in turn improve organizational performance. In this chapter we provide an analysis of this literature and highlight the key contributions and debates that emerge from studying the relationship between employee attitudes, HR practices and organizational performance (e.g. Becker et al., 1997; Purcell et al., 2003; Wright and Nishii, 2006). Looking at employee attitudes, organizational commitment is critical to organizational performance since it reflects employees’ supportive attitudes towards the organization (e.g. Baotham et al., 2010; Zeinabadi, 2010).