How Sustainable Human Resource Management Practices Enhance Employee Performance? A Multilevel Study

Abstract

A distinguishing feature of sustainable human resource management (HRM) research is that it emphasizes the mutual gains of HRM practices for firms and employees. Yet, how sustainable HRM practices may enhance employee performance remains understudied in the HRM-performance outcomes literature. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, we argued that sustainable HRM practices provide valuable workplace resources for enhancing employee resilience as a crucial personal resource, which in turn help to improve employee performance through its’ positive impact on work engagement. A multilevel and multisource study of a Chinese sample offers support for our theoretical predictions that employee resilience and work engagement serially mediated the cross-level relationship between sustainable HRM practices and employee performance. The paper contributes to our knowledge of how factors related employee wellbeing, namely employee resilience and work engagement, provide the underlying mediation mechanisms through which sustainable HRM practices influence the performance of employees.