High-involvement work processes and employee well-being: an analysis of the European Working Conditions Survey 2021

This seminar will focus on high-involvement work processes: forms of work organisation in which employees experience greater job control and participation in decision-making. It will review research,  both quantitative and qualitative, on the high-involvement model of HRM, summarising findings on the outcomes for employees and organisations. It will highlight the strong contingencies that affect the high-involvement model in particular contexts. It will then discuss research conducted with Dr Md Shamirul Islam and Profs Gordon Cheung, Kenneth Cafferkey and Keith Townsend, interrogating one of the largest datasets available: the European Working Conditions Survey 2021. Drawing on Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory, our study (n = 17,668) deploys mediation and moderated-mediation analyses to assess how the job resources of organisational participation and work autonomy are related to employee well-being via employee engagement and exhaustion. The seminar will show the relative impacts of these two types of involvement across 36 Europe nations. How work intensity affects the involvement-wellbeing relationship will be analysed, along with the frequency of working from home. The seminar will draw conclusions for theory, practice and public policy.

About Peter Boxall

Peter Boxall (MCom Auck., PhD Monash, DistFHRNZ) is a professor in Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland Business School and an international visiting professor in the Department of People, Work and Employment at Leeds University Business School. He graduated with a BCom in Economics in 1977, an MCom in Management Studies in 1987 and a PhD in Human Resource Management in 1992. His degrees were interspersed with business and educational work experience in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, he has served as a Head of Department and as an Associate Dean of Research, among other roles. Peter’s research is concerned with strategic HRM and employee well-being and has appeared in such journals as Human Resource Management Journal, Human Resource Management Review, the Journal of Management Studies, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Economic and Industrial Democracy, and Work, Employment and Society. With John Purcell and Patrick Wright, he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press, 2007) and with Richard Freeman and Peter Haynes, he co-edited What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace (Cornell University Press, 2007). He is the co-author with John Purcell of Strategy and Human Resource Management, now in its fifth edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Peter is a Distinguished Fellow of the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand and was the inaugural President of its Academic Branch, which is committed to enhancing the engagement between HRM academics and practitioners.

This seminar will take place in person in room T8-67, Mandeville Building. Alternatively, click here to join the seminar online via Zoom.

Meeting ID: 652 8143 7856