Supportive Human Resource Management and Employee Work-related Well-being: An Empirical Study Based on Mediating Mechanism

Abstract

To improve employee well-being is not only one of the important goals of corporate ethical responsibilities, but also one of the important sources for an organization to gain competitive advantage. Therefore, human resource management system aiming at enhancing employee work-related well-being, has gradually become a tendency for many corporations. Supportive human resource management (SHRM) embodying the concern of organizations for their employees’ contribution and well-being corresponds naturally to well-being-oriented human resource management. With the understanding of well-being from trait theory to constructivism, many scholars have made theoretical interpretation and empirical research on the antecedents of workplace well-being, according to Warr’s （1987） vitamin model, Bakker and Demerouti’s （2007） JD-R model and Walton’s （1974） quality of work-life model. Although some scholars agree that SHRM has a positive impact on employees’ work-related well-being, it still needs to reveal how SHRM affects employees’ well-being in the workplace. In terms of research method, the pairing method is used to collect data from different sources. Each corporation is issued six questionnaires, one of which (including SHRM practices and organizational ownership climate) is assessed by HR directors and five (including individual’s work-related well-being, self-efficacy and organizational identification) are assessed by employees. Collective work-related well-being is aggregated by individual work-related well-being in the same corporation. Based on a sample of 347 employees from 71 companies, it reveals how SHRM exerts different influences on collective and individual work-related well-being respectively by using multi-level linear model. It arrives at the findings as follows: SHRM has a positive impact on individual and collective well-being in the workplace. Employee’s organizational identification and self-efficacy fully mediate the positive relationship between SHRM and individual work-related well-being. Meanwhile, SHRM has a positive impact on collective work-related well-being, but no impact on individual work-related well-being through the part mediation role of organizational ownership climate. It has practical implications. In order to maintain the rise in collective work-related well-being, managers should implement SHRM to create organizational ownership climate as well as to provide real tangible gains. SHRM can promote individual work-related well-being only through being transformed into an employee’s sense of gains. These implications can broaden the thinking of human resource management aiming to enhance employees’ work-related well-being, but also provide a theoretical basis for those corporations to create happy organizations. So it makes main contributions: firstly, three mediating variables (i.e., organizational ownership climate, organizational identification and self-efficacy) are proposed to clarify the impact mechanism of SHRM on work-related well-being based on the organic integration theory; secondly, it deepens the understanding of work-related well-being by comparing the impact mechanisms of SHRM on collective and individual well-being in the workplace. At last, it also points out the limitations. Firstly, the use of cross-sectional data may result in a limited persuasiveness of these conclusions. Secondly, it may restrict the guiding value of our findings to set SHRM as a whole variable because it has not revealed how various SHRM practices and their internal matches affect work-related well-being.