Tomokazu Takeuchi

The importance of employee development is increasing for establishing potential long-term competitiveness for firms. However, little is known about how a firm's investment in employee development, especially as perceived by employees, leads to an increase in employee work outcomes. We, therefore, highlight the concept of perceived investment in employee development (PIED), which can be defined as employees' belief that their organizations care about their well-being, career development, and personal growth by equipping them with new knowledge and skills. Specifically, drawing on social exchange theory and fit theory perspectives, we propose to examine the mediating role of person and environment (P-E) fit, such as person and organization (P-O) fit and person and job (P-J) fit, in how employees' perceptions of investment in employee development by organization leads to increased work outcomes, including job satisfaction, job involvement, and intent to stay. Additionally, we incorporated into the mediation process the moderating effects of career planning on the relationships between P-O and work outcomes and between P-J fit and work outcomes, as guided by a goal-setting theory. We tested the hypothesized mediational and moderational relationships using a sample of 144 Korean employees working for privately owned firms in Korea. Our empirical analyses generally supported the mediating effects of both P-O and P-J fit and the moderating effects of career planning in the process that relates PIED to improved employees' work outcomes, except for the mediating effects of P-E fit (i.e., P-O fit, P-J fit) on the relationship between PIED and employees' turnover intentions. We use the findings to discuss the role of P-E fit and individual career planning in the effectiveness of employee development practices that organizations offer. We also discuss the study's limitations and the direction of future studies.

Previous studies on strategic HRM (SHRM) tended to focus on examining the effectiveness of organizational-level HRM practices and their impact on a firm's economic performance. A number of extant studies have empirically demonstrated that some forms or a bundle of HRM practices (i.e., HRM systems) increased organizational performance, and thereby the performance implications of a certain type of HRM systems, which is referred to as high-performance work systems (HPWS), have gradually been accepted by both researchers and practitioners. Questions still remain, however, regarding the inner mechanisms of the HPWS effects on employees' work attitudes and performance. In this study, we attempted to offer and test a unique multilevel model that incorporates both the mediating role of the leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships and the moderating role of organizational climate into the process by which the use of an establishment's HPWS is related to employees' job satisfaction, involvement, and performance. Using the longitudinal data collected from 396 employees and their immediate supervisors in 31 Japanese establishments at three points in time, the study has demonstrated that the quality of LMX relationships mediates the relationships between the use of HPWS and employees' satisfaction, involvement, and performance. Moreover, organizational climate pertaining to organizational goal clarity was found to moderate the positive cross-level relationship between HPWS and the LMX quality. Findings were used to discuss a new perspective in the application of a social exchange theory to the understanding of HRM-performance relationships.