Configuring optimal contextual performance and task performance in offshore business processing organizations

Purpose Occupational stress is damaging to employee well-being, causes serious illnesses and costs organizations billions of dollars every year. Mutual gains model of human resource management (HRM) recommends that HRM practices should improve both employee well-being and performance. Offshore business processing organizations (BPO) are renowned to have intense wok environment. The study aimed to deploy mutual gains models in BPO to determine if positive perceptions of HRM practices (or benevolent HRM attributions) can help employees manage their stress better and improve their task performance (TP) and contextual performance (CP). Furthermore, work gratitude (WG) was examined to see if it acted as an intermediary in the relationship between benevolent HRM attributions, employee stress management (SM), TP and CP. Design/methodology/approach Primary data of 368 respondents were collected from the employees working in BPO. Structural equation modeling technique was deployed for the testing of causal relationships among constructs. AMOS 24.0 was used for the estimation of theoretical model. Findings Empirical outcomes affirmed strongly knitted theoretical associations among the constructs. Originality/value This study contributes to literature by proposing a framework which shows how HRM attributions can enhance employee's TP, CP and improve employee SM through the mediating influence of WG.