HRM practices, impersonal trust and organizational innovativeness

Purpose – Organizational processes that create conditions to facilitate employee innovativeness have become topical due to the constant demand for organizations to renew themselves. Research shows that human resource management (HRM) practices can been used to create such conditions, but also the important complementary role of organizational trust has been highlighted in this context. In particular, earlier studies have mostly focused on the concept of interpersonal trust. However, impersonal trust (the individual employee’s expectations about the employer organization’s capability and fairness) has recently been suggested to be an equally or even more relevant facilitator supporting the effect of HRM practices on organizational innovativeness. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The hypotheses were tested with two large-scale quantitative studies from the forestry and information and communication technology industries in Finland. Structural equation modelling (with LIS...

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