Balancing organizational effectiveness and employee psychological well-being: the relationships among high-performance work systems, mindfulness, and job stress

Under the fast changing and unpredictable market environment, firms have been struggling to address challenges from fierce competitions and survive, and, in turn, workplace environments have become increasingly demanding and stressful. While high-performance work systems (HPWS) have been received strong supports as innovative HR systems for organizational effectiveness in the field of strategic human resource management, some critical perspectives argued that HPWS may result in detrimental consequences to employees, such as job stress. The current study investigates the relationship between HPWS and job stress, the relationship between mindfulness and job stress, and the moderating role of mindfulness in the HPWS-job stress relationship. This study analyzed data collected by a survey responded by 280 employees in the various industries in Vietnam. The analysis results of the study showed that HPWS was positively associated with job stress, mindfulness was negatively associated with job stress, and mindfulness moderated the relationship between HPWS and job stress in a negative way. The result implies that management should pay more attention to employees’ psychological well-being when firms adopt HPWS, and provide supports for training programs that cultivates mindfulness, to reduce negative impact of HPWS on employee psychological well-being.