Employee Voice Human Resource Management Practices and Organizational Innovative Performance

Abstract

We deal with employee voice from the human resource management (HRM) perspective and examine how voice HRM practices - formal practices that are designed to provide employees with opportunities to voice - affect organizational innovative performance. Both promotive and prohibitive voice HRM practices are examined. Using a large national sample of employers, we test hypotheses based on the general systems theory, extending and contrasting to the traditional HRM perspectives such as universal, contingency, and configurational approaches. Our application of systems theory leads us to extend the universal approach by considering the mediation role of employee participation in the voice HRM-innovation link. Furthermore, system theory predicts that voice HRM will partially mediate the voice HRM-innovation link; in contrast, the contingency approach predicts that strategies act as moderators. Systems theory also predicts that functionally related HRM practices will act as substitutes to voice HRM practices, while the configurational perspective argue they will act as complements. Overall, our results support the systems theory perspective. Moreover, we find that both promotive and prohibitive HRM practices positively relate to organizational innovative performance. As such, our study provides new insights into the outcomes of employee voice opportunities as well as the microfoundations of organizational innovative performance.