Peter Boxall - High-involvement work processes and employee well-being

This seminar will begin with a brief overview of the notion of ‘high-performance work systems’. Clearing aside what is unhelpful and misleading in this literature, it will focus on the concept of high-involvement work: a model of HRM in which workers experience greater job control and participation in decision-making. This model has good merit for research and for the practical question of how to improve the quality of working life. The seminar will then discuss research conducted with Dr Md Shamirul Islam and Profs Gordon Cheung, Kenneth Cafferkey and Keith Townsend, interrogating one of the largest datasets available: the European Working Conditions Survey 2021. Drawing on Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory, our study (n = 17,668) deploys mediation and moderated-mediation analyses to assess how the job resources of organisational participation and work autonomy are related to employee well-being via employee engagement and exhaustion. The seminar will show the relative impacts of these two types of involvement across 36 Europe nations (including the UK). How work intensity affects the involvement-wellbeing relationship will be analysed, along with the frequency of working from home. The seminar will draw conclusions for theory, practice and public policy.

About the presenter

Peter Boxall (MCom Auck., PhD Monash, DistFHRNZ) is a professor in Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland Business School and an international visiting professor in the Department of People, Work and Employment at Leeds University Business School. His research is concerned with strategic HRM and employee well-being and has appeared in such journals as Human Resource Management Journal, the Journal of Management Studies, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Economic and Industrial Democracy, and Work, Employment and Society. With John Purcell and Patrick Wright, he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press, 2007) and with Richard Freeman and Peter Haynes, he co-edited What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace (Cornell University Press, 2007). He is the co-author with John Purcell of Strategy and Human Resource Management, now in its fifth edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Host or Publisher Leeds University Business School