Line managers’ role in HR on employees’ affective commitment to the organization

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the employees' perception of their line manager’s enactment of HR practices and their leadership behavior on one side, considering the employees’ affective commitment to the organization. Therefore, based on the social exchange theory, we investigate the impact of human resource management investments, made by the line managers, on employees’ affective commitment. More precisely, we analyze the impact of two independent variables, namely the line managers’ enactment of HR practices and the line managers’ leadership behavior. Also, we study the interaction of the mediating effect that leadership behavior has on the relationship between the enactment of HR practices and employees’ affective commitment. Our research contributes to already existing literature in several ways. First, we focus on the line managers’ role in HR, which has received little attention in human resource management research. Moreover, we emphasize the perceived HRM rather than the intended as this is related to the behavioral reactions of employees. A total of 339 employees working within the field of healthcare service were examined in this study. We chose the health-care service since it is a branch where optimization of our chosen aspects could be a matter of life or death, thus giving us a better basis for contributing to society. Furthermore, according to the findings of hierarchical regression analysis, line managers may increase employees’ affective commitment by effectively implementing HR practices and demonstrating relationship-oriented leadership behavior. Lastly, implications for our research are discussed.