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Impact of the coupling of enterprise HRMPs and labor union practices on employee creativity
Zhou Xiao, Hu Enhua, Shan Hongmei
2023, 44(11):
164-172.
DOI: 10.19571/j.cnki.1000-2995.2023.11.017
The current research on the relationship between human resource management practices (HRMPs) and labor union practices and its effects mainly roots in the western industrial relations context, and the results cannot help us understand the relationship between the two types of practices in Chinese enterprises. Labor unions in western countries (such as the United States) only act as representatives of employees, and often compete for employees′ interests with HRMPs. Labor protection won by this competitive relationship can help reduce the risk of innovation failure and increase the enthusiasm for creativity; however, the salary increase promoted by labor unions with ‘monopoly face’ will create ‘misplaced incentives’ for employees, which may hinder employee creativity. This makes the improvement of employee creativity uncertain. In contrast, labor unions in China not only promote the development of enterprises, but also safeguard the rights and interests of employees. The coordination of interests of enterprises and employees makes it easier to form cooperation between labor union practices and HRMPs, and achieve results that are difficult to realize by one single type of practices. In fact, with the advancement of China′s grass-roots labor union reform, the interaction between labor union practices and HRMPs has become more extensive in enterprises. In addition to the frequent interactions in traditional fields such as communication channel construction, collective negotiation, employee care, and training & development, interactions between the two have also become more normal in facilitating employees′ participation in innovation. The interaction between HRMPs and labor union practices in Chinese enterprises has gradually emerged as a new source for promoting employee creativity. However, researchers have paid little attention to this phenomenon. Based on the attention-based view, this article constructed a cross-level model to examine the impact of the coupling of enterprise HRMPs and labor union practices (CHLPs) on employee creativity. Multi-level structural equation model was applied to analyze the matched data of 61 enterprises and 351 employees. The results indicated that: (1) CHLPs has a significant positive effect on employee creativity, and this effect goes beyond the influence of HRMPs. (2) CHLPs can promote employees′ attention on behavioral alignment through clear goals and discipline, which improves exploitative learning to enhance employee creativity. Also, CHLPs can promote employees′ attention on behavioral adaptation by giving them abundant support and gaining higher trust, which improves exploratory learning and thus boosts employee creativity. Furthermore, CHLPs can create a balanced situation including elements of discipline, goal, support, and trust to optimize the scanning, interpretation, and action of employees′ attention allocation. In this way, the balance of ambidextrous learning emerges, which in turn facilitates employee creativity. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, findings of this paper are conducive to understanding the outcomes caused by the relationship between HRMPs and labor union practices in Chinese enterprises, thus promoting the localization of research on the relationship between the two kinds of practices. Secondly, it proves that CHLPs is a new source of employee creativity, which contributes new knowledge to the research on the antecedents of employee creativity. Thirdly, the introduction of attention-based view reveals the driving mechanism of CHLPs on employee creativity, and also facilitates the application of attention-based view in the field of employee creativity research.In a practical manner, the present study will provide implications for Chinese enterprises to foster employee creativity. Firstly, enterprises can enrich their ways to accelerate employee creativity through CHLPs. when improving employee creativity, HRMPs tend to emphasize disciplines and goals while relatively easy to ignore supports and trusts. In this regard, enterprises can promote the cooperation between HRMPs and labor union practices to enhance employees′ trusts and commitments. In addition, enterprises can promote the supervision of labor union practices on HRMPs, which can strengthen the protection of employees′ rights and interests, and thus provide guarantee for the free development of employee creativity. Secondly, in the process of promoting CHLPs to improve employee creativity, enterprises should also attach importance to cultivating employees′ ambidextrous learning and its balance. Enterprise managers should make full use of the advantages that HRMPs and labor union practices can interact in multiple fields. They can improve employees′ understanding of ambidextrous learning through HRMPs and labor union practices, reduce employees′ perception of the risks of balancing ambidextrous learning, integrate heterogeneous resources of the two types of practices, and thus improve employees′ ability to switch between exploitative learning and exploratory learning.
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