A new look at the relationships between transformational leadership and employee attitudes — Does a high‐performance work system substitute and/or enhance these relationships?

Even while attempting to explain the same outcomes, research on leadership and on human resource management (HRM) have largely progressed on parallel trajectories. We extend recent efforts to bring these fields closer together by testing how employee perceptions of a high-performance work system (HPWS) and transformational leadership (TL), independently and jointly, influence four important employee attitudes. Analyses of 308 subordinates of 76 managers in five multinational companies suggest that a HPWS substitutes for much of the independent influence of TL and constitutes an important boundary condition for some of this influence. Implications for future research on HRM and leadership are discussed.