From Employee-experienced High-involvement Work System to Innovation: An Emergence-based Human Resource Management Framework

The influence of human resource management on innovation has attracted considerable research attention over the last decade. However, existing studies have primarily focused on the macro-level human resource management architecture, limiting our understanding about the cross-level origin of innovation. Developing an emergence-based human resource management framework, we propose that an employee-experienced high-involvement work system (HIWS) promotes innovation by eliciting collective interactions for knowledge exchange and aggregation. Further, we investigate the emergence-enabling process that facilitates an employee-experienced HIWS to give rise to organization-level innovation. Specifically, we probe three distinct emergence enablers that amplify the positive influence of HIWS on innovation by shaping the concertedness, direction, and adaptability of collective interactions: (1) the homogeneity of HIWS experiences as the internal mechanism, (2) the strategic importance of innovation as the external mechanism, and (3) the churn in human resources as the temporal mechanism. We tested our theoretical model using data from a nationally representative sample of workplaces in Canada (n = 2,639). Our results suggest that an employee-experienced HIWS was positively related to innovation. In addition, this positive effect was amplified by all three emergence enablers (i.e., the homogeneity of HIWS experiences, the strategic importance of innovation, and the churn in human resources).