Discretionary HR practices and employee well-being. The roles of job crafting and abusive supervision
| Date | 12 November 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-05-2018-0162 |
| Pages | 43-66 |
| Published date | 12 November 2019 |
| Author | Tuan Trong Luu |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
Discretionary HR practices and
employee well-being
The roles of job crafting and abusive supervision
Tuan Trong Luu
Faculty of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne Business School,
Swinburne University of Technology, Kuching, Malaysia
Abstract
Purpose –The more HRM systems invest in employees’work life and career growth beyond legal
requirements, the happier employees are. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of discretionary HR
practices in promoting employee well-being as well as mechanisms underlying this effect.
Design/methodology/approach –The participants for the study came from retail shops of a large
information technology company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The data set collected from these participants
was analyzed through multilevel structural equation modeling and bootstrapping methods.
Findings –The results of this study provided empirical support for the relationships between discretionary
HR practices and the psychological, physical and social dimensions of employee well-being. Job crafting was
found to serve as a mediator for these relationships. Abusive supervision played a role in attenuating the
effects of discretionary HR practices on the dimensions of employee well-being as well as job crafting.
Originality/value –This inquiry extends the research stream on the HRM-employee well-being relationship
by examining the predictive role of discretionary HR practices.
Keywords Quantitative, Discretionary HR practices, Employee well-being, Job crafting,
Abusive supervision, Vietnam
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Research has supported the view that human resource management (HRM) practices are
deemed to be the means through which employee perceptions, attitudes and sense of
well-being in the workplace are shaped (Alfes et al., 2013; Guest, 2017; Peccei, 2004;
Van De Voorde et al., 2012). Work-related well-being refers to “the overall quality of an
employee’s experience and functioning at work”(Grant et al., 2007, p. 52). Since well-being
brings employees a source of energy to stay with and contribute to their organization
(Albrecht and Marty, 2017), work-related well-being is a theme that the work-life balance
literature still has centered on (Ugwu et al., 2016; Zheng et al., 2016) and recent reviews of
employee well-being (e.g. Guest, 2017) have called for more HRM inquiries into
mechanisms underlying employee well-being.
HRM studies have focused on the effects of high-involvement (Wood and Ogbonnaya,
2016) and high-performance HRM systems (e.g. Heffernan and Dundon, 2016; Ogbonnaya
et al., 2017) on employee well-being. While high-performance HRM systems are designed to
build ability and collaboration among employees for problem-solving and high performance
(Appelbaum et al., 2000), high-involvement HRM systems entail providing the power for
employees to make decisions (Wood and Ogbonnaya, 2016). Driven more by
organizationally beneficial outcomes than employee outcomes especially their quality of
work life, such specific HRM systems tend to focus on specific organizationally beneficial
outcomes such as high performance or high engagement in decision making. Albeit these
HRM systems contain some elements of a discretionary HR system, research is required to
build a comprehensive picture of how discretionary HR practices shape employee
well-being. Discretionary HR practices refer to an organization’s investment in employees’
performance and career development that is nonmandatory, nonobligatory, and not
Personnel Review
Vol. 49 No. 1, 2020
pp. 43-66
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-05-2018-0162
Received 8 May 2018
Revised 25 October 2018
Accepted 22 February 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
43
Discretionary
HR practices
and employee
well-being
externally regulated (Shore and Shore, 1995; Gavino et al., 2012). These practices are
designed to influence employees to identify with the goals of their team and organization,
enhance their competencies and empower them (Gavino et al., 2012).
Therefore, through investment in employees beyond administrative requirements
(Gavino et al., 2012), discretionary HR practices signal to employees the support that the
organization provides in terms of resources such as knowledge and skills, social support as
well as autonomy to help employees perform effectively and grow professionally. Such job
resources have been reported to foster the sense of well-being among employees
(Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). With such job resources, employees not only fulfill their work
roles but also feel committed to the work team and its goals (Albrecht and Marty, 2017), and
thus find more meaning in their work.
Investigating employee perceptions of discretionary HR practices and their effects on
employee well-being, our study follows employee-centered or employee-level HRM perspective
(Wright and Boswell, 2002). Different from management-centered HRM perspective that views
employees as passive recipients of HR practices, employee-centered HRM perspective advocates
the likelihood that employees can act as active or proactive members and they themselves shape
their own state of mind through their perceptions and observations of HR practices (Lepak and
Boswell, 2012; McBride, 2008; Meijerink et al., 2018). This employee-centered HRM perspective is
also in line with the shift from top-down job designtobottom-upjobdesigninwhichemployees
“craft”their job resources to produce job meaning (Rosso et al., 2010; Wrzesniewski and Dutton,
2001). Nonetheless, the HRM research and job crafting research streams face a barrier for
convergence since there has been an argument that employees are prone to craft their job design
when they are lacking resources from the organization (Wang et al., 2018). However, the
conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1988) holds that in receipt of resources,
especially generous resources such as through discretionary HR practices, employees are
inclined to conserve or even amplify such resources in a gain spiral. Hence, perceiving and
receiving job resources through discretionary HR practices, employees may be more likely to
draw upon such resources to further enhance job resources such as via job crafting. Besides this
potential convergence between discretionary HRM and job crafting, employee act of crafting
their job helps them experience more job meaning, connectedness with others, and less
hindrance job demands, thereby developing the sense of well-being (Bakker and Demerouti,
2017). Seeking to examine the role of employee job crafting in linking discretionary HR practices
to employee well-being, the current research can advance the convergence between HRM and
jobcraftingresearchstrandsaswellasfillaresearch gap on the role of employee proactivity in
the equation of HRM and employee attitudinal outcomes (Guan and Frenkel, 2018; Luu, 2019;
Meijerink et al.,2018).
Moreover, since the consistency in signals from HRM practices and the leader may
strengthen employees’perceptions of HRM practices (Ostroff and Bowen, 2016), we aim to
investigate how a leader with abusive supervision, who sends signals contradicting those
from discretionary HR practices, influences the effect of discretionary HR practices on
employees’job crafting and in turn their well-being. Within our research model, abusive
supervision alludes to the extent to which supervisors tend to display hostile verbal and
nonverbal behaviors, barring physical contact (Tepper, 2000, p. 178).
Through theaims of investigating the relationship between discretionaryHR practices and
employee well-being as well as mechanisms underlying this relationship, our research can
contributeto the literature in some ways. First, thisinquiry further bridges the gap of research
on the role of HRM practices with discretionary nature in activating employee well-being.
Prior researchon the link between HRM and employee well-beinghas tended to assess generic
HRM practices (Alfes et al., 2012) or HRM systems that contain some specific discretionary
elements to foster specific employee outcomes such as high performance (Heffernan and
Dundon, 2016; Ogbonnaya et al., 2017) or high involvement (Wood and Ogbonnaya, 2016).
44
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