Employees' Perceptions of HR Practices: Its Meaning, Antecedents, and Consequences

Abstract

This dissertation advances knowledge of strategic human resource management by clarifying the concept of employees’ perceptions of HR practices and empirically examining its antecedents and consequences, focusing on the role of managers’ perceptions of HR practices in the development and function of these perceptions.

Based on a review of the concepts and measurements of employees’ perceptions of HR practices, this dissertation first demonstrates that employees’ perceptions of HR practices are not a monolithic concept but a complex one incorporating three components: employees’ perceptions of the “what,” “how,” and “why” of HR practices. Next, the empirical findings on this topic are evaluated, and it is shown that employee HR perception literature has been dominated by studies with a cross-sectional design and focusing on the perceived content (“what”) of HR practices, neglecting two other aspects (“how” and “why”) of HR perceptions. It is also evident that not much is known about the antecedents of HR perceptions.

An empirical study, involving data from 380 employees with 32 line managers in Chinese state-owned enterprises, is used to examine the positive relationship between managers’ and employees’ perceptions of HR practices. This study also investigates the factors that strengthen this relationship. The results show that when employees’ cultural values are similar to those of their managers, employees’ perceptions of HR will be similar to that of managers’. In addition, value similarity more strongly augments the relationship between managers’ and employees’ perceptions of HR practices for employees with high metacognitive and cognitive cultural intelligence.

A second empirical study explores how congruence between managers’ and employees’ perceptions of HR practices affects the relationship between employees’ perceptions of these practices and employee outcomes. The study reveals that employees’ psychological well-being is maximized when managers’ and employees’ perceptions of HR practices are congruent. Cross-level polynomial regression and response surface analysis on data from 158 manager-employee dyads from Chinese state-owned enterprises generally supports this claim.