Research On The Influence Of Human Resource Management Strength On Employee Engagement

In today’s competitive environment, a highly engaged staff is an important factor to gain competitive advantage for many companies. In recent years, domestic and foreign scholars have made some useful exploration on how to promote employee engagement through human resource management, but the study focuses on the content of human resource management, ignoring something in the process of human resource management, that is, whether human resource management can deliver sufficient and clear information to employees. This is more critical to the impact of employees’ attitudes and behavior. Bowen and Ostroff define it as the strength of human resource management. There is no research on the relationship between the strength of human resource management and employee engagement currently. There have been few scholars in deeply There is no research on the relationship between the strength of human resource management and employee engagement currently. Few scholars study deeply the relationship between human resource management system strength, perceived organizational support and employee engagement in China.Based on the review of relevant research, according to attribution theory and social exchange theory, this paper constructs the hypothesis model about the relationship between the strength of human resource management, perceived organizational support and employee engagement, aiming to address the following problems:firstly, to study how individual factors such as gender, age and nature of organization affect the perception and attitude of employees, whether employees have significant differences on the perception of human resources management strength, perceived organizational support and employee engagement; secondly, to test the effect of human resource management strength and its various dimensions on employee engagement and its dimensions; thirdly, to probe into the concrete mechanism how the strength of human resource management affects employee engagement with the mediating variables such as perceived organizational support and its dimensions.This study collects data in the way of questionnaire. In order to ensure the reliability and validity, this study mainly uses the domestic and foreign mature scale to carry on the pretest, and the formal questionnaire is revised and formed according to the result of exploratory factor analysis. This study investigates 676 Chinese employees, using SPSS22.0 and AMOS21.0 for data processing. Confirmatory factor analysis was first conducted to examine the intrinsic structure of each variable identified by exploratory factor analysis; then the reliability analysis was carried out to assess the reliability and stability of the questionnaire. On this basis, the preliminary analysis is made by adopting the method such as descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, independent sample T test and one-way ANOVA. Finally, the research hypothesis is tested through hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Conclusions are as follows:(1) The structure model of human resource management strength, perceived organizational support and employee engagement for Chinese employees are the same as the theoretical constructive model.(2) The strength of Human resource management is significantly positively correlated with employee engagement. Distinctiveness, the dimension of human resource management strength, is significantly positively associated with dedication and vigor, the dimension of employee engagement, respectively. The same is true for consensus. Consistency, the dimension of human resource management strength, has not significant promoting effect on devotion and vigor.(3) There is significant positive relationship between strength of human resource management and perceived organizational support. Distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus respectively have significant positive correlation with emotional support, the dimension of perceived organizational support. Distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus respectively have significant positive effect on instrumental support, the dimension of perceived organizational support.(4) Perceived organizational support has significant positive correlation with employee engagement. Emotional support is significantly positively associated with dedication and vigor; instrumental support is also significantly positively correlated with dedication and vigor.(5) Perceived organizational support has a mediating role between the strength of human resource management and employee engagement. Emotional support, instrumental support respectively plays a partial intermediary role between distinctiveness, consensus and dedication. The above two dimensions are also partial mediating variable between distinctiveness, consensus and vigor. In a word, the strength of human resource management can not only directly effect on employee engagement, but also indirectly influence on employee engagement through perceived organizational support.This study firstly tests the direction and extent of human resource management strength on employee engagement, supplements the theory of "HRM—employees’ attitude and behavior". Previous researches on employee engagement are mainly from the content of human resources management system, and show the effects of human resource management practices on employee engagement, when the strength of human resource management is high, it will create strong situations in which HRM messages are effectively communicated to employees and employees share a common interpretation of what attitudes and behaviors are organization expected and rewarded, then promote the emergence of ideal results.Therefore, the research introduces into the strength of human resource management to discuss its effect on employee engagement, so as to contribute to the theory of "HRM—employees’attitude and behavior". In addition, on the previous basis, this paper further expands the scope of outcome variables of human resource management strength; meanwhile, it increases the antecedent variables of employee engagement.Secondly, this study analyses the intrinsic mechanism between human resource management system strength and employee engagement. This study confirms that human resource management system strength has indirect impact on employee engagement by perceived organizational support, so as to deepen the mechanism research of human resource management system strength influencing employee attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, perceived organizational support, the composition of organizational climate, reflects the positive relationship between employees and organizations. The results of this study also preliminarily verify the theoretical scheme of Bowen and Ostroff--organizational climate plays intermediary role between strength of human resources management and outcome variables.According to the above analysis, this study puts forward some specific strategies on how to promote employee engagement such as promoting the distinctiveness and consensus of human resources management system and making employees feel the organization’s concern and respect.