Can HRM Practices Boost Employees Job Satisfaction?

A joint study by the Colorado State University and the Texas State University highlighted the relationship between perceived favorability of HRM practices vs. job satisfaction, and the extent to which trait entitlement alters that balance. While it appears that there is a direct link between perceived favorability of HRM practices and high employee job satisfaction, offering more or better HRM practices will not automatically yield increased job satisfaction as employees expectations differ with regard to what they feel they deserve.

Bottom line, employers need to consider other factors than just employee satisfaction when deciding what HRM practices to implement.

Do you have a particular success story related to HRM practices that you would like to share? You can leave your comments here or join the discussion on our Facebook page.



Zinta S. Byrne, Brian K. Miller and Virginia E. Pitts. "Trait Entitlement and Perceived Favorability of Human Resource Management Practices in the Prediction of Job Satisfaction.” Journal of Business and Psychology, Volume 25, Number 3 (2010): 451-464

Trait-Based Leadership VS. Situation-Based Leadership (Part 1 of 3)

In reaction to "Understanding the Nature of Talent", I have decided to embark on a 3 part adventure.

There must, of course, be a difference between trait-based leadership and situation-based leadership. While the difference between the two may seem, at once, strikingly obvious, a recognition as to which “type” of leadership is the most appropriate and, ultimately, most beneficial for the development of “business” is, in the same moment, less than clear.

History offers us innumerable examples of both trait-based leadership and situation-based leadership. During the industrial revolution, as hoards of former farmers flocked to the cities, we see, really for the first time in our country’s history, an overwhelming demand for strong leadership across nearly every industry. The need for professional “team leaders” was, of course, augmented by high demand for the fast, efficient, as well as quality controlled, production of nearly everything imaginable for the growth of a nation, including war materials. As soldiers returned from the Second World War, it became clear that there was, in fact, a substantial difference between the leadership practices that were employed by the Pattons, Grants and Washingtons (the pseudo-mythical conception of the Born Leader) and the Henry Fords and Rockefellers who had spurred success not so much by infiltrating the hearts and minds of those under them, but by recognizing the significance of various aspects of their own contemporary matrix and capitalizing on them.

Whether the successes of the Henry Fords and the Rockefellers were enough to demystify our view of leadership and transform it from a trait-based to a situation-based conception remains to be seen. Even today, the myth of the Born Leader, is used to explain the successes of our nation’s greatest Presidents, corporate titans and the like. Nevertheless, there seems, in recent years, to have been the beginnings of a “shift” toward the conception of a leader as someone in possession of a number of skills, learned skills, and so, the conception of leadership as something that can be developed in anyone willing to learn.

To Be Continued...