The purpose of the present study was to examine whether and how the quality of the employee–organization relationship (EOR) influences the relationship between employee perception of developmental human resource (HR) practices and employee outcomes. Analyses of 593 employees representing 64 local savings banks in Norway showed that four indicators of the EOR (perceived organizational support, affective organizational commitment, and procedural and interactional justice) moderated the relationship between perception of developmental HR practices and individual work performance. A strong and direct negative relationship was found between perception of developmental HR practices and turnover intention, but perceived procedural and interactional justice moderated this linkage. No support was found for a mediating role of the EOR indicators in the relationship between perception of developmental HR practices and employee outcomes. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Two disparate theoretical views of how informational contexts affect managerial sensemaking and decision making appear in organizational research. An organizational information processing perspective posits that increasing the flow of information within and between organizations will enhance environmental awareness. In contrast, behavioural decision making and social cognition research suggest that information may increase the occurrence or magnitude of overconfidence and illusions of control. These competing predictions were examined by means of an investigation of the relationship between informational contexts and top managers’ strategic issue interpretation. Findings indicate that managers whose organizations have environmental information readily available to them perceive higher control over issues than managers in organizations with lower informational availability. Moreover, managers in top management teams with higher information processing capacity seem to perceive higher degrees of control and manageability, and search for less data in issue interpretation, than managers in teams with lower information processing capacity. These results offer some support for the behavioural decision making and social cognition perspective, and question the organizational information processing prediction that organizations engaging in active information processing are more aware of the environment and more likely to assess environmental developments, trends or events in a more vigilant manner.

To learn more about the role of line managers in the implementation of HR practices, we propose and test a model of line managers' perceptions of enabling HR practices on the one hand and employee outcomes on the other. In a field study of 89 line managers and 631 employees, we observed that the relationship between line managers' perceptions of enabling HR practices and employees' intrinsic motivation, affective organizational commitment, and turnover intention was mediated by employees' perceived supervisor support. Line managers' perceptions of enabling HR practices, in turn, were predicted by line managers' perceived quality of the HR training they received. Theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.