| The “new normal” of the Chinese economy and the uncertainty of the international situation force Chinese firms to rely heavily on continuous improvement and innovation to obtain and maintain competitive advantage in turbulent and hypercompetitive markets.However,employees,as the source of innovation in the organizations,often prefer to keep silence rather than voice when they have ideas for possible improvements or solutions to organization deficiencies.Employee voice behavior describes actions that building constructive ideas,perspectives and solutions for organization's deficiencies,and that expressing those ideas/perspectives/solutions to the specific objects in and out of the focal organization(supervisor,coworker,et al.).Previous studies have shown that employee voice behavior provides decision-maker more realistic and accurate information based on their firsthand experience during organizational daily operation,which will fundamentally changes the single-informational-source situation.Scholars also have confirmed the positive impact of employee voice on organizational innovation,financial performance and firm's competitive advantage.An extensive body of research on employee voice has developed over the past few years.This work has typically taken the views of leadership,personality,and other personal characteristics,and basically ignored the influence of human resource management.However,the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity theory,signaling theory and other theories in the field of human resource management suggest that human resource management(HRM)system and practices play a significant role in employee attitude and behavior through environment improvement,culture construction and task arrangements.Although theories suggest that HRM system and practices impact employee voice and empirical studies confirmed that HRM system and practices have a positive impact on employee attitude and behavior,there is little empirical investigation of such propositions between HRM system and employee voice.The lack of evidence makes it difficult for scholars and managers to fully understand the situation of Enron Group collapse in which employee choose to be silent instead of voice even although they aware of what going wrong in the organization.Considering the urgent practical problems and relative lack of theoretical evidence,this dissertation explores employee voice in the line of human resource management based on the Chinese context.In the Chinese context,researchers have shown that high-performance work system for/in Chinese firms is a "hybrid" human resource management system that combines control work practice and commitment employment practices.The emergence of this hybrid HRM system is due to China's current stage of economic development,social background,and demographic structure on the one hand and a mixture of Chinese traditional “Iron Rice Bowl” system,America Taylor scientific management and Japanese lifelong employment on the other.Therefore,focusing on the issue,this dissertation tries to answer this question: in the face of the “hybrid” HRM system of commitment and control practices(Hybrid-HRM),whether and why employees engage in voice behavior.To answer this problem,this dissertation chooses individual employees as the object and constructs the model and hypothesis by using the framework of "cognition-emotion-behavior(CEB)".The employee cognition refers to employee's perception of Hybrid-HRM,which means how employee percept HRM system that implemented in the focal organization.Different from the mainstream “unitarist perspectives”,this dissertation responds to the trend of “pluralist perspective” in HRM field.The unitarist scholars assume that organizational HR intention and practices are always effectively implemented as it supposed to,that the positive impact of HRM on organizational performance are mediated by positive employee attitude and behavior,and that employees are a homogeneous group that will response to the same HRM practices consistently and similarly.More evidence,however,shown that those assumptions are inauthentic: 1)HRM policy and practice often failed to convey the firm owners' and managers' intention to employees;2)the leverage of HRM to organizational performance are often at the cost of employees;3)employee reaction to the same HRM practices varied due to individual differencesand personal experiences.As a result,employee awareness or perception of Hybrid-HRM is the most proximate and important antecede in their own attitude and behaviors.The emotion aspect is represented by employee well-being,which refers to the subjective evaluation and emotional experience of people,affairs,and things in the workplace.The inclusion of employee well-being make it possible to study the “mutual gain” assumption in HRM field and answer the following question: does HRM system and practices really have a positive/negative/no impact on the employee? As we have described above,HRM scholars holding “mutual gain” assumption believe that the impact of HRM on enhancing organizational performance and on enhancing employee ability,motivation and opportunity happens simultaneously.More precisely,employees' ability,motivation,and opportunity mediate the relationship between HRM system and organization performance.However,more and more researchers believed that the interests of employees and organizations owners/managers are not entirely consistent(skeptical perspective),and HRM systems improve organizational performance at the cost of the expense of employee because of their increased workload and intense work strains(pessimistic perspective).This dissertation argues that employees and organization owners/managers' interests are not consistent(pluralist),but both employees and organization will benefit from HRM system and practices(mutual).Specifically,on the premise of improving employee well-being,employees are more willing to engage in extra-role behavior and pro-organizational behavior that will facilitate organizational performance.Employee voice behavior is the “behavior” aspect of CEB framework.By reviewing related research,this dissertation has found that previous research paid much more attention to the motivation aspect of voice,ignoring the competence aspect of voice.Although the relationship between employee competence and their voice is presumably strong,it has rarely been tested empirically.Most studies assume that employees can find problems happening in the organization and have the capacity to build a solution to fix the issue,but this assumption has never been tested before.As a result,this dissertation explores the dual-process mechanism of perceived hybrid-HRM and employee voice behavior by subsuming employee human capital as the competence aspect of voice.Going further,this dissertation also explores the distal mediation effect of employee well-being in the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM system and employee voice through human capital.To sum up,by using the "cognition-emotion-behavior" framework at the employee level,this dissertation constructs a chain mediating model in which perceived hybrid-HRM as the independent variable,employee well-being as the distal mediator,the employee human capital as the proximal mediator,and employee voice behavior as the dependent variable.To test this model,this dissertation collected data from 799 employees in Chinese enterprise by questionnaire survey,used confirmatory factor analysis,exploratory factor analysis and common method mutation detection to analysis questionnaires validity and reliability and quality of data,and then used ANOVA,independent variance T-test,structural equation model to test the hypotheses.All the hypotheses are confirmed by the results.Employee's perceived hybrid-HRM employees have a positive impact on the employee voice behavior.Both human capital and employee well-being play partial mediator in the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM and employee well-being,respectively.When employee human capital and employee well-being are simultaneously added into this relationship,the dual-process mediation mechanism is confirmed.However,when employee human capital is related to employee well-being,the impact of perceived hybrid-HRM on human capital is no longer significant,which means employee well-being fully mediate the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM and employee well-being.Moreover,the result confirm that employee well-being is a distal mediator in the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM and employee voice.Perceived hybrid-HRM leverage employee well-being that enhances employee human capital,and eventually facilitate employee voice behavior.The contributions of this dissertation and its differences with previous studies are listed as following: 1)From individual perception perspective,this dissertation explores the mechanism of the hybrid-HRM system on employee voice behavior;2)From employee well-being,this dissertation tests whether or not perceived hybrid-HRM has a negative impact on employees and whether or not interests between employee and organization are consistency;3)From empirical evidence,this dissertation confirmed that employee well-being have positive impact on employee human capital,which means employee well-bingsplay a full mediator role in the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM and employee human capital,and have distal mediation effect in the relationship between perceived hybrid-HRM and employee voice behavior.The findings and contributions of this study help to form a clearer understanding of the “black box” between HRM-individual attitude/behavior,provide theoretical support for the future transition of HRM system and practices from mixture of control and commitment to model of more commitment and less control,and give theoretical reference for how employees(human capital)and enterprises(monetary capital)achieve common value,share surplus value and cogovern enterprises. |
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