The differential effects of human resource management on organizational innovation: a meta-analytic examination
Abstract
Purpose
This meta-analytical review aims to clarify the relationships between three bundles of human resource management (HRM) practices—competency-enhancing, motivation-enhancing and opportunity-enhancing—and organizational innovation by addressing two questions: (a) Which types of HRM bundles are most strongly related to different forms of innovation (i.e. process and product innovation)? And (b) Which mechanism provides a stronger explanation for the positive effects of HRM bundles on innovation?
Design/methodology/approach
Based on data from 103 studies, a meta-analysis was conducted to quantitatively summarize existing HRM–innovation studies at the organizational level.
Findings
The results showed that the competency-enhancing bundle was more positively related to product innovation than the motivation-enhancing and opportunity-enhancing bundles. The opportunity-enhancing bundle was most strongly associated with process innovation. The authors further found that knowledge management capability (KMC) and employee motivation mediated the positive relationship between the three HRM bundles and innovation outcomes. In comparing the two mechanisms, this review suggests that KMC better explains both the impact of the competency-enhancing HRM bundle on product innovation and the effect of the opportunity-enhancing bundle on process innovation.
Originality/value
Based on behavioral and knowledge management perspectives, this study takes a sub-bundle approach to providing an integrative review by comparing the direct effects and mediating paths of HRM bundles on product and process innovation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72102051), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2020A1515110530), 2021 Education Science Planning Project of Guangdong Province (Special Project for Higher Education) (2021GXJK702), and Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (GD23CGL19).
Since acceptance of this article, the following author(s) have updated their affiliation(s): Mengsang Chen is at the Department of Scientific Research, Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, Guangzhou, China and Mengdi Wu is at the Department of Mathematics, Guangdong University of Education, Guangzhou, China.
Citation
Chen, M., Wu, M., Wang, X. and Wang, H. (2023), "The differential effects of human resource management on organizational innovation: a meta-analytic examination", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-08-2021-0487
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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