The Framework of First-Line Manager's HR Role Identity and HR Implementation

Abstract

The field of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) has accentuated the crucial role first-line managers (FLMs) play in promoting both employees and organizational performance through their effective implementation of adopted HR practices. The discourse on SHRM is typically based on the premise that if the designed HR systems at the organization level can be appropriately adopted and implemented, the organization will achieve performance goals. Yet, research evidence has recently highlighted a potential gap between organizations’ espoused HR strategies and the HR practices actually experienced by employees. This is so because HR practices may be carried out with considerable variation across workgroups even within organizations, with the FLM being the implementer of such HR practice. Therefore, research on how FLMs identify themselves as the HR implementer becomes critical. Drawing on role identity and social context theories, this thesis introduces a framework of FLM’s HR role identity that extends the current theorization of what precedes their effective HR implementation. This thesis suggests that FLMs’ role identity will guide their HR implementation behavior by attaching the HR role to their self-concept. Although the framework of social context has emphasized the importance of contextual factors in influencing employee attitudes and behaviors, the process through which particular types of HR involvement would promote or prohibit role perceptions is still an undeveloped area of inquiry. This thesis recommends that, by examining HR involvement of immediate superiors and peers that impact FLMs’ HR role identity and consequent HR implementation behaviors, the questions of why some FLMs believe they are HR implementer while others do not and why FLMs react differently to their HR role can be answered. Hypotheses are tested through survey data collected from 105 FLMs and 518 team members in 9 Chinese companies. The results showed general support for the proposed research model. Therefore, the current thesis advances the existing research on FLM in the following ways. First, this study develops the concept of FLM’s HR role identity and suggests it as a more stable cognitive process of FLMs to generate a self-view toward their HR role. Second, this research includes FLMs’ perceptions of immediate superiors’ and peers’ HR involvement as important contextual factors that facilitate or impede the salience of FLMs’ HR role identity. More specifically, immediate superiors’ HR orientation and peers’ HR implementation are found to positively influence FLMs’ HR role identity, while immediate superiors’ bottom-line mentality and peers’ cynicism about HR have negative effects on FLMs’ HR role identity. In addition, immediate superiors’ and peers’ workplace status is found to strengthen the positive effects of their HR involvement and FLMs’ HR role identity. Third, this research adds to the FLM literature by characterizing multiple forms of FLMs’ HR implementation behaviors within workgroups – strict implementation, externally adaptive implementation, and internally adaptive implementation – and establishes that FLMs’ HR role identity triggers different behavioral patterns depending on their motivational processes (i.e., goal orientations). Finally, this research considers intra-team acceptance and FLMs’ workplace status as important outcomes of FLMs’ HR implementation. Taken together, this thesis develops several propositions that serve as the baseline for future endeavors.