Abstract
Over the last couple of decades, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to exploring strategic high-performance work systems (HPWS) as the key determinant of firm performance. While a large body of research has drawn on the content-based perspective to contend that a set of interconnected human resource (HR) practices can exert the influence on employee outcomes, when aggregated, on organisational performance, less is known about the process-based view by which the effect of HR practices on individual performance largely reside in HR attributions or the meanings that employees attach to the motives underlying the HR practices they experience (Nishii et al., 2008). Drawing on the attribution theory (Heider, 1958; Kelley; 1973; Weiner, 1985) and the signaling theory (Connelly et al., 2011), we aim to build and test a general framework where HPWS affect individual performance through two types of HR attributions (e.g. commitment-focused HR attributions and control-focused HR attributions) in the context of Vietnamese small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Added to this, line manager’s solicitation of voice is positioned to moderate the HPWS-HR attribution link. The study uses sample of 30 Vietnamese small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), including 108 team leaders and 430 employees, and multilevel structural equation modelling (MSEM) with Mplus.