Differing Impacts of HR Attribution on Commitment: The Moderating Role of Self-Perceived Status

Service organizations pursue two goals of employee well-being and organizational performance as primary for their human resource management. Research has suggested that these two goals draw ambivalence attributions (i.e., HR well-being attribution and HR performance attribution) which have opposite impacts on employee attitudes. However, research has yet considered how to relieve the tension from the attributions. We attempt to elucidate the process of how a high-performance work system (HPWS) elicits employee affective commitment through HR well-being and HR performance attributions and to suggest how to attenuate the contrary effects. Specifically, drawing from theory on the psychological experience of status, we argue that employees’ self-perceived status moderates the relationship between HR performance attribution and affective commitment. With data from 475 nurses in 82 work units, we found that an HPWS exerts HR well-being and HR performance attribution simultaneously, but only HR well-being attribution, not HR performance attribution, was significantly related to affective commitment. We also found the moderating effect of self-perceived status such that HR performance attribution is positively related to affective commitment when self-perceived status is high. These findings offer critical theoretical insights with equally important practical implications.