How Line-Manager Leadership Styles and Perceived HRM Practices Contribute to Employee Performance

Abstract

Plenty of studies presented how leadership styles and HRM practices influence employees in organizations separately, but only a few considered the combined effects of some certain types of leadership and HR management practices. Based on configurational theory, we provide a more holistic view by integrating task-oriented, relations-oriented, and change-oriented leadership, and hygiene-motivate HR practices to detect distinct configurations of leadership styles and HRM practices that may lead to high and not-high employee performance. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and data of 108 pairs of ling-managers and followers in China, we find five sufficient configurations for the presence of high employee performance, and three for its absence, which provides evidence for the three propositions of “multiple conjunctural causation”, “equifinality”, and “asymmetry”.