Human Resource Management (HRM), Employee Well-Being and Performance: Empirical, Conceptual and Meta-Analytic Essays

This thesis examines the relationships between Human Resource Management (HRM), employee well-being, and performance using empirical, conceptual, and meta-analytic approaches. It comprises three essays that address complementary questions: how employee satisfaction with HRM systems influences employee well-being and team performance; how occupational health psychology frameworks (OHPFs) have been used and integrated in HRM research; and does employee well-being mediate the relationship between HRM and organizational performance.
The first essay analyzes survey data from 9,489 employees in a Finnish shipping and logistics company, exploring relationships among employee satisfaction with HRM, employee engagement, stress, and perceived team performance. Multilevel mediation models showed that satisfaction with HRM practices is positively and significantly related to employee engagement and perceived team performance and negatively and significantly related to stress. Employee engagement partially mediated the relationship between employee satisfaction with HRM and team performance at both within- and between-team levels, while stress partially mediated this relationship at the between-team level. These findings highlight the importance of employees’ attitudes toward HR practices in shaping work-related behaviors and performance.
The second essay provides a conceptual review of 64 quantitative studies to evaluate how OHPFs have been applied in HRM, employee well-being, and performance research. The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) Model and Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory emerge as the most widely used frameworks, while the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) Model remains underutilized. A new conceptual model integrating OHPFs is proposed, emphasizing underexplored mechanisms such as interactions between personal and job resources and demands, gain and loss spirals, and moderating influences of individual and organizational factors, including personality and leadership. This model offers a structured direction for future research seeking to clarify how HRM influences employee well-being and performance.
The third essay uses meta-analytic structural equation modeling on 42 quantitative studies to test whether employee well-being mediated the HRM–organizational performance relationship. Results show that HRM is positively and significantly related to happiness and relational well-being, both of which partially mediate its relationship with organizational performance. These findings support the mutual gains perspective rather than conflicting outcomes perspective.
Collectively, this thesis advances the understanding of how HRM influences employee well-being and performance at employee, team, and organizational levels, clarifies the relevance of the mutual gains and conflicting outcomes perspectives, and provides an integrated OHPFs-based framework for future research. Practically, the findings offer guidance for designing HRM systems that support employee well-being while enhancing organizational performance.