Author:

Keywords:

SHRM, HRM system strength, job satisfaction, turnover intentions

Abstract:

Bowen and Ostroff (2004) explicitly distinguish between HRM content and HRM process, introducing the concept of HRM system strength. More than 120 researchers within six years after the publishing of the article refer to the authors in their own work and are intrigued by their theory. Yet only little empirical work has been done on the process aspect of HRM, especially with regard to the popular concept of HRM system strength. We address this gap and provide empirical evidence for the HRM process features influencing performance. The main purpose is to add to the SHRM-field and HR-turnover literature by testing the link between the process features of HRM system strength, namely distinctiveness, consistency and consensus, and turnover intentions. We hypothesize that distinctiveness, consistency and consensus positively affect job satisfaction and negatively affect turnover intentions. Next, based on turnover literature, we expect job satisfaction to mediate the relation between HRM system strength and turnover intentions. Furthermore, we hypothesize that distinctiveness will strengthen the negative effect that consistency and consensus have on turnover intentions. In addition we expect these interactions to be mediated by job satisfaction. We collected data from 532 employees from 13 small and medium-sized organizations in Belgium and The Netherlands. Simple regression analyses were used to test for direct and indirect effects. To test for mediation of the interaction term, also known as ‘mediated moderation’, we used the medmod-macro of Preacher, Rucker and Hayes (2007) that employ bootstrapping procedures. As expected, job satisfaction substantially predicts turnover intentions. Both consistency and consensus, negatively influences turnover intentions. Furthermore, our findings underline the importance of consistency in predicting turnover intentions when distinctiveness is low. This implies that, for instance, when employees do not understand the HRM practices (low distinctiveness) and feel that HRM do not help the organization in achieving its goals (low consistency), they report higher intentions to leave, than when they do see the added value of the HR-department (high consistency). We did not found an effect of distinctiveness on turnover intentions, when simultaneously introducing consistency and consensus into the model. Scholars are challenged to gather more evidence for mediating and moderating effects of the processs features of HRM system strength on performance.