Employee psychological conditions as mediators of the relationship between human resource management and employee work engagement

Abstract

Employee work engagement is an asset valued by today’s organisations, not only as an indicator of well-being at work but also because it improves both employees’ work performance and organisational performance. Knowing how employee work engagement can be fostered in the firm is therefore a subject of great interest to both academics and managers, but few studies have examined how organisational interventions positively affect employee work engagement. In this research, we focus on the relevance of organisations’ human resource management to promote high levels of engagement among their employees. The theoretical framework guiding our research, Kahn’s (1990) model, provides interesting insights into the mechanisms through which human resource management influences employee work engagement. By testing a multilevel model based on matched data from a sample of 146 HR managers and 504 employees in Spanish companies, our analyses show that high performance work systems have a positive influence on work engagement through the employee psychological conditions of meaningfulness, psychological safety and psychological availability.