No description available.

The aim of this study is to discuss the query: ¡§When organizations apply different human resource (HR) systems in managing their employees with different characteristics, what will be the employees¡¦ possible performance patterns?¡¨ by modifying and extending Lepak & Snell¡¦s (1999) HR architecture. According to employees¡¦ contribution to the sustained competitive advantages (SCAs), we first identified two main characteristics of employees: complexity and uniqueness. The employees could be further categorized into core, unique, complex, and imitable HR and the HR architecture is thereby constructed. Furthermore, based on agency theory and transactional cost theory, we propose behavioral control and internal development as the two main strategies for managing employees with different characteristics: integration with HR architecture, and construction of human resource management (HRM) architecture. Finally, there are exchange relationships between employees and their organizations. Since psychological contracts reflect employees¡¦ beliefs in the terms and conditions of a reciprocal exchange relationship between them and their employers (Rousseau, 1995), they are viewed as the best linking mechanism between HR systems and employee behaviors (Wright & Boswell, 2002). Accordingly, we adopted psychological contract perspective to discuss the relationships between HR systems and employees¡¦ role behaviors and sequentially proposed the corresponding psychological contract architecture as well as the performance architecture. Multilevel analysis and t-test of data from 172 Taiwanese datasets (172 copies from immediate managers and 806 from employees) revealed that different HR systems not only are applied to manage different types of employees but also elicit different patterns of employees¡¦ performance. First, organizations would like to apply higher levels of internal development and lower levels of behavioral control in managing their core HR. These strategies caused employees to believe that they had a long-term exchange relationship with the organizations and simultaneously improve their in-role behaviors, OCBI, and OCBO. In contrast, organizations would like to apply lower levels of internal development and higher levels of behavioral control in managing their imitable HR. This governance made employees focus on specific performance-reward contingencies in their exchange relationships with the organizations, as well as to enhance their in-role behaviors. Next, organizations would like to apply higher levels of internal development and behavioral control in managing their unique HR. These strategies caused employees to believe that they had a long-term exchange relationship with the organizations, with an emphasis on specific performance-reward contingencies. For this reason, this HR system could prompt employees¡¦ appropriate in-role behaviors and OCBO. Finally, according to the HRM architecture, an organization should theoretically apply a lower level of internal development and behavioral control in managing its complex HR. Since it is not possible to form employees¡¦ psychological contract or create relevant role behaviors when organizations do not actively adopt specific strategies to manage them, we did not empirically examine the relationships between HR systems and employees¡¦ complex role behaviors. However, complex HR still contributes to the SCAs. Accordingly, future research could focus on complex HR and explore which types of HR system would be beneficial in regard to their role behaviors.