Some organizations have implemented suggestions by  Harvard’s Richard E. Walton to cultivate a  “high-commitment work systems (HCWS)” as a “lever” to positively influence employee productivity, retention, and innovation.

High-commitment employee benefits are designed to elicit employees’ reciprocal commitment and intrinsic motivation to support the organization’s objectives.
These programs include:

• Employee participation initiatives,
• Team rewards,
• Profit sharing,
• Career development training,
• Internal transfer opportunities,
• Internal advancement opportunities, with preference over external candidates,
• Employment ”security.”

Organizations with these programs, measured by High Commitment Work System Scale, had employees who provided more innovative solutions to complex tasks in a study of more than 50 technology firms in China by Song Chang of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with Nanjing University’s Liangding Jia and Yahua Cai, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Riki Takeuchi.

“High-commitment work systems (HCWS)” can occur in organizations with varying approaches to human capital management, described by China Europe International Business School’s Zhixing Xiao and Anne S. Tsui of Arizona State University:

• 

  Anne Tsui

  Mutual-investment (or organization-focused) strategies combine:
  –Economic exchanges with
  –Social exchanges including implied trust and reciprocity leading to
  –Expectations of employment security,

• Quasi spot-contract (or job-focused) philosophies based on:
  -Economic-exchange model with
  -Market-like flexibility that
  -Enables employers to easily hire and discharge employees.

  In the United States, “at-will employment” permits employers to terminate any employee at any time for any reason or no reason without warning, noted Miami University’s David Walsh and Joshua Schwartz.

Although this job-focused approach does not imply trust or reciprocity, many contract employers offer employee benefits similar to those in “high-commitment” workplaces.

This contrast between employers’ implied social contract by offering high-commitment benefits with at-will employment may appear incongruous to employees.
The result may be confusion, cynicism or disengagement.

High-commitment benefit programs can enable “creative situations,” where individual motivation can contribute to commercial innovation.

Organizations that establish creative work situations typically offer some high-commitment employee programs, according to Harvard’s Teresa Amabile:

• Job rotation,
• Training to increase subject matter expertise,
• Job autonomy,
• Working in teams to solve problems and deliver products,
• Participative management.

Despite not guaranteeing employment tenure, these programs were associated with:

• Egalitarian culture,
• High trust,
• Support for disrupting status quo.

High-commitment employee programs can lead to increased innovation and related commercial opportunities.

However, organizations with at-will employment practices and high-commitment benefits can benefit from clearly communicating the limits of their commitments to avoid adverse employee reactions.

-*What are most effective ways to integrate coexisting at-will employment policies with “high-commitment work systems”?


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©Kathryn Welds