HRM & Psychology

Question 1

What are the dimensions of employee performance?

Answer 1

• Task
• Membership
• OCB

Question 2

What are the dimensions of employee work attitude?

Answer 2

• Job satisfaction
• Organisational commitment
• Motivation

Question 3

What is social exchange theory?

Answer 3

• HRM practices signal to employees how much the organisation values them and supports their well-being
• HRM practices, which are experienced primarily through managers (agents of the organisation), shape the type of exchange relaiotnship employees have with the organisation
• Social exchange theory posits that the type of perceived exchange relationship between employees and organisations affects job performance and employee engagement
• Employees who perceive that the organisation values them and cares for their well being will reciprocate that treatment

Question 4

What are the types of exchange and social exchange theory and what are the outcomes?

Answer 4

• Social exchange - reciprocity
• Economic exchange - purely transactions
• When employees perceive the relationship to be based on social exchange, they are more likely to be committed high performers

Question 5

What are psychological contracts?

Answer 5

• Built on social exchange theory, psychological contracts refer to employees’ “belief that a promise has been made and a consideration offered in exchange for it, binding the parties to some set of reciprocal obligations”
• The fulfilment or breach of these expectation influences work attitudes and behaviours
• Psycholgical contract breach takes place when one party in a relationship perceives that the other party has neglected to fulfil what has been committed or promised
• Implicit, not contractualised

Question 6

What is the soft model and what does the opposite entail?

Answer 6

• Sometimes called the ‘high commitment’ model of HRM
• There are bundles of HR practices that support the Harvard model or ‘soft’ model of HRM
  
  • Investment in learning and development
  • Enhanced communication systems
  • Employee involvement and participation in decisions
  • Fair rewards
• The ‘hard’ approach focuses on efficiency and reducing labor costs

Question 7

What is organisational justice?

Answer 7

• Felt-fairness or perceived fairness is central to the state of the psychological contract
• Also known as organisational justice perceptions

Question 8

What are the dimensions of organisational justice?

Answer 8

• Procedural justice
• Interpersonal justice
• Distributive justice

Question 9

What is procedural justice?

Answer 9

• Dimension of organisational justice
• Concerns fairness in HR processes and managerial decision making
• Considerations are epsiecally pertinent to the procedures involved in measuring and assessing individual performance

Question 10

What is distributive justice?

Answer 10

• Dimension of organisational justice
• Related to the felt-fairness of allocative decision making outcomes
• Paritucalry pertinent to employee evaluations and expectations of reward processes
• Based on relative and absolute equity perceptions (equity theory) over/under reward

Question 11

What is Leader-Member Exchange?

Answer 11

• According to LMX, the quality of the realtoinshp between a leader/supervisor and follower predicts employee attitudes and behaviours
• Reinforces the importance of FLMs in the people management - performance causal chain
• There is evidence that LMC quality predicts job performance, satisfaction with supervisors, commitment and turnover intentions

Question 12

What is expectancy theory?

Answer 12

• Can offer some practical insights into motivation in the context of reward and performance processes
• Based on the assumption that work behaviour is determined by individual expectation of the likely consequences of such behaviour

Question 13

What are the conditions of expectancy theory?

Answer 13

• Valency (the worth of the reward)
• Expectancy (effort-performance link)
• instrumentality (performance-reward link)