Elucidating the relationship between high-investment HR systems and workforce engagement: The role of employee education

Luigi Stirpe and Antonio J Revilla
Additional contact information
Luigi Stirpe: Department of Business Administration, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Antonio J Revilla: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2025, vol. 46, issue 2, 568-595

Abstract: Although high-investment HR systems (HIHRS) help forge a more dedicated workforce, our understanding of their effectiveness across employee profiles is imperfect. Integrating the social exchange perspective with human capital insights, this article investigates the engagement outcomes of HIHRS for employees of different education levels. Analyses on an international sample of 24,976 employees reveal, first, that HIHRS deliver greater marginal engagement outcomes at low to moderate than at moderate to high intensities, defining a concave HIHRS–engagement relationship. Additionally, they show that at low to moderate intensities, the curve rises less steeply for more (versus less) educated employees, suggesting that education lessens the marginal engagement outcomes of HIHRS. However, at moderate to high intensities, these marginal outcomes drop less steeply for more educated employees. Such findings highlight the intricacies of HIHRS as motivational tools and advise cautious use by employers.

Keywords: Employee education; engagement; high-investment HR systems; social exchange; workforce differentiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X241268292 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:46:y:2025:i:2:p:568-595

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X241268292

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().