Demands or resources? The relationship between HR practices, employee engagement and emotional exhaustion within a hybrid model of employment relations

By Edel Conway, Na Fu, Kathy Monks, Kerstin Alfes, Catherine Bailey. 2016

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article explores the ways in which employees may experience and respond to tensions inherent in the mix of potentially conﬂ icting human resource (HR) practices that compose hybrid models of employment relations. By drawing on the job demands–resources (JD-R) literature and viewing HR practices as “demands” and “resources,” we explore the impact of performance manage-ment and employee voice practices on employee well-being, as exempliﬁ ed by engagement and emotional exhaustion, in a large public-sector organization in Ireland. Our ﬁ ndings suggest that employee voice mechanisms may act as a resource in both enhancing engagement and in counterbalancing the demands presented by a performance management system, thus reducing the deleteri-ous effects of emotional exhaustion. Our study extends understanding of hybrid models of human resource management (HRM) and of the ways in which employ-ees manage the contradictory signals that such models may send in terms of performance expectations.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef03a41b99417dc9820bdfa919fe3731a9b89bbe

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In General Health Professions

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Developmental HRM, employee well-being and performance: the moderating role of developing leadership (2019, methodology): “Following previous research, we represent the former by using affective organizational commitment (AOC; e.g., Ramsay et al., 2000; Heffernan and Dundon, 2016; Veld and Alfes, 2017) and the latter by exhaustion (e.g., Vanhala and Tuomi, 2006; Zhang et al., 2013; Conway et al., 2016).”
High performance work practices and their associations with health, happiness and relational well-being: are there any tradeoffs? (2019, unknown): “Warr, 2007), meaning in work (Schnell, Höge, & Pollet, 2013), and engagement (Conway et al., 2016).”
Exploring the Job Demands–Resources Model of Work Engagement in Government: Bringing in a Psychological Perspective (2017, background): “Conway et al. (2016) also showed that performance management within the public sector has no effect on Borst et al. 377 work engagement.”
Exploring the relationships between high involvement work system practices, work demands and emotional exhaustion: a multi-level study. (2018, background): “As a result of this, employees feel more respected by the organization (Wood et al., 2012), and experience more control and direction over their work (Conway et al., 2015; Wood & de Menezes, 2011).”
What Is a Resource: Toward a Taxonomy of Resources for Employee Engagement (2020, background): “A climate that encourages employees to speak up about their ideas and opinions (Conway et al., 2016) and a fair work environment (Shahpouri, Namdari, & Abedi, 2016) supported the development of engagement.”