مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

HRM studies are increasingly focusing their attention on the effects that bundles of policies have on targeted outcomes (Kepes and Delery, 2008; Jackson, Schuler, and Jiang, 2014). HRM theory argues that integrated, aligned and consistent HRM policies generate positive synergistic effects on targeted outcomes. Thus, HRM systems, i.e. “the pattern of planned human resource activities to enable an organization to achieve its goal” (Wright and McMahan, 1992: 298), exert an impact on targeted outcomes that goes beyond the sum of their individual policies (Jiang et al., 2012). This theoretical framework endorses an ‘optimistic’ view of synergies, according to which positive complementarities are intrinsic to a bundle of HRM policies, and their multiplicative effects can be developed through appropriate investments (Jiang et al., 2012). Empirically, evidence of synergies between HRM policies is however sparse and heterogeneous. The most common operationalization of synergies is the additive approach, which either sums or averages the values of practices used in the HRM system (Jiang et al., 2012, p. 81). This operationalization is “built on a specific and rather conservative form of synergy, that assumes little substantive interaction” (Chadwick, 2010, p. 88). Those studies going beyond additive approach for measuring the existence of synergies among HRM policies have provided different, and sometimes contradictory, results. Some have found significant multiplicative effects (e.g. Subramony, 2009; Bello-Pintado, 2015; Combs, Liu, Hall, and Ketchen, 2006; Way, 2002), while others did not (e.g. Godard, 2004; Gerhart, 2007).

Reviewing these partial and contradictory results, influential commentaries have argued that evidence of synergistic effects is “overstated” (Chadwick, 2010; p. 89) and have developed a more critical and contingent perspective on their existence (e.g. Wall and Wood, 2005; Gerhart, 2012). More generally, testing the existence and evaluating the nature of synergies between HRM policies represent today a major call in HRM empirical research (e.g., Boxall, 2013; Posthuma, Campion, Masimova, and Campion, 2013).

Our study responds to this call by testing the existence of synergistic effects between the policy domains of HRM systems targeted at the development of organizational ethics. These targeted HRM systems are designed to increase employees’ perception of benevolent and principled ethical climates in the organization. Those HRM systems, which are more and more diffused for reducing the diffusion of opportunistic behaviors and personal misconduct with the organization (SHRM, 2013), are typically based on AMO frameworks (i.e. combining policies oriented at increasing employees’ ethical Abilities, Opportunities and Motivations, Jiang et al., 2012). In the paper, which is based on a probabilistic sample of 6000 employees from six European countries, we compare an independent effects model, according to which the AMO policy domains of the HRM system under study exert an additive effect on outcomes, with a synergistic effects model, according to which these policies have interactive effects. We compare the explicative power of the two models through a comparison of fit, variable significance, and magnitudes of their effects on performance.