High Performance Work Practices: A Study of Variations Based on Personal Characteristics

Abstract

High Performance Work Practices (HPWPs) has evolved as a pivotal paradigm of performance excellence. These practices are applied in bundles to accrue complementary benefits associated with each practices. Literature suggests that success of any system relies on various employee related factors. The present paper highlights variations among employees awareness and perception for HPWPs based on individual characteristics like gender, sex, experience etc. Differences in employees awareness and perception could arise owing to different inbuilt mechanism to filter external information. Presently as many as thirty-five HPWPs have been considered. Factor analysis reduces 35 practices into nine factors. It is observed that employees awareness varies significantly across age, experience and educational qualification of the employees. However employees awareness is observed to gender neutral. Further employees perception is reported to vary significantly across all four individual characteristic taken in the study i.e. gender, age, experience and educational qualification of the employees. Further nine extracted factors are subjected to test of variance across various variables of individual differences. Lastly paper gives a glimpse of practical utility of the findings and a brief description of future research scope is also given herewith.

Keywords: High Performance Work Practices, High Performance Work System, Gender, Awareness, Perception

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