중소기업의 헌신형 인적자원관리와 조직성과 : 조직에 대한 신뢰와 CEO의 기업가정신의 역할

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have limited human and physical resources than large firms and are characterized by high risk and dynamic working environments. Most employees in SMEs are in charge of critical roles for gaining and sustaining a firm competitive advantage. Thus, human resources having knowledge and technologies are a critical factor for survival and performance in SMEs. Although many previous studies on macro human resource management (HRM) have examined the effects of-HRM systems on firm performance, most of them used large firms as their samples. Some studies took SMEs as their research settings but showed at best inconsistent results in terms of the relationship between HRM and firm performance. In the case of research targeting SMEs, focusing a few policy choices is important because SMEs cannot afford to take extensive HRM practices given limited resources. In addition,more appropriate characteristics of SMEs should be taken into account in the formula when the relationship between HRM and firm performance is examined. In line with these arguments, the purpose of this study is to examine the mechanism of the relationship between high commitment (HC) HRM system and organizational performance. More specifically, this study analyzes a mediating effect of trust in management and a moderating effect of CEOʼs entrepreneurship in the relationship between HRM and performance. HC HRM system is a configuration of principles, policies, and practices designed to enhance employeesʼcapabilities, commitment, and opportunities through which high performance can be realized. HC HRM includes such policies as employment security, selective hiring, self-managed team,extensive training and development, participation in decision-making, organizational performancebased compensation, egalitarianism, and sharing information (Pfeffer, 1998). These policies enhance employeesʼ commitment and trust toward organization based on the norm of reciprocity and social exchange. We defined trust as the employeeʼs belief in organizational leaders, which leads employees to believe that organizational actions prove to be beneficial for employees. Trust influences to form positive attitudes and behaviors of employees in the organization. In the case of CEOʼs entrepreneurship, it usually contains three aspects : innovativeness, proactiveness,and risk-taking propensity. The CEO characteristics enhance empowerment and innovative behaviors. Therefore, CEOʼs entrepreneurship positively enhances the relationship between trust and organizational performance. Taking a contingency perspective, it would be interesting to see how the relationship is strengthened or weakened by a contingent factor, CEOʼs entrepreneurship. Based on these arguments, we generated following hypotheses:H1 : High commitment HRM system is positively related with trust-in-management of employees. H2 : Trust-in-management is positively related with organizational performance. H3 : Trust-in-management mediates the relationship between high commitment HRM and organizational performance. H4 : The higher the level of CEOʼs entrepreneurship, the stronger the positive relationship between trust-in-management and organizational performance. We used three sources of data for this study. The first source is the Human Capital Corporate Panel (HCCP) which is to measure HC HRM system and trust-in-management. Second, organizational performance was measured as the logarithm of sales per employee from KISinfo data. Finally, we collected survey data from CEOs of SMEs to measure CEOʼs entrepreneurship. The sample of this study is SMEs in Korea and the sample size is 89. The results of the analyses revealed that the relationship between HC HRM system and performance was fully mediated by trust-in-management and that the relationship was moderated by CEOʼs entrepreneurship. This study empirically suggests that implementing HC HRM system in SMEs enhances performance. The adoption of CEOʼs entrepreneurship, which is critical especially in SMEs, strengthened the effect of HC HRM system on performance. However,firms having high level of CEOʼs entrepreneurship showed lower productivity when low level of trust-in-management exists. This study contributes to the macro HRM research by extending the scope of HRM field. Since SMEs have unique features, it is critical to include relevant variables to the formula. The inclusion of CEOʼs entrepreneurship is an improvement. A practical implication of this study is that we could observe the critical roles of trust-in-management and CEOʼs entrepreneurship in SMEs. Finally, we derived some lessons for managers with regard to the designing of HRM system and its effect on performance.