A meta-analysis of country differences in the high-performance work system–business performance relationship: The roles of national culture and managerial discretion.
verifiedmedium profile · Journal of Applied Psychology · 2014
Rabl, Tanja; Jayasinghe, Mevan; Gerhart, Barry; Kühlmann, Torsten M.
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
Our article develops a conceptual framework based primarily on national culture perspectives but also incorporating the role of managerial discretion (cultural tightness-looseness, institutional flexibility), which is aimed at achieving a better understanding of how the effectiveness of high-performance work systems (HPWSs) may vary across countries. Based on a meta-analysis of 156 HPWS-business performance effect sizes from 35,767 firms and establishments in 29 countries, we found that the mean HPWS-business performance effect size was positive overall (corrected r = .28) and positive in each country, regardless of its national culture or degree of institutional flexibility. In the case of national culture, the HPWS-business performance relationship was, on average, actually more strongly positive in countries where the degree of a priori hypothesized consistency or fit between an HPWS and national culture (according to national culture perspectives) was lower, except in the case of tight national cultures, where greater a priori fit of an HPWS with national culture was associated with a more positive HPWS-business performance effect size. However, in loose cultures (and in cultures that were neither tight nor loose), less a priori hypothesized consistency between an HPWS and national culture was associated with higher HPWS effectiveness. As such, our findings suggest the importance of not only national culture but also managerial discretion in understanding the HPWS-business performance relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “…relations, promotion and performance management, as strategically crucial contributors to organizational performance (OP hereafter), and called the cluster a high-performance work system (HPWS hereafter) (Chen & Chen, 2021; Rabl, Jayasinghe, Gerhart, & Kühlmann, 2014; Sun, Aryee, & Law, 2007).”
supports “Specifically, Rabl, et al. (2014) empirically supported the importance of cultural fit of high-performance work systems for organizational performance.”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.