High Involvement Work Practices and Temporary Employment Practices: Do They Make Workers Work Harder, Smarter, or Kinder?

This paper examines how two popular employment practices, high involvement work practices (HIWPs) and temporary employment practices, work on workers and firms, using a survey of nurses in New Jersey, U.S.A., hospitals. For this purpose, discretionary work effort construct is developed, resulting in three factors – working harder, working smarter, and working kinder effort. Then, a positive relationship is found between HIWPs and perceived quality of work, partially mediated by working smarter effort, and a negative relationship is found between temporary employment practices and perceived quality of work through partial mediation by working harder effort. The simultaneous investigation of HIWPs and temporary employment practices, with these different relationships, gives a chance to reconsider on the use of these two employment trends.