The correlations between high performance work systems, human resource flexibility and organizational performance

The black box between High performance work systems(HPWS) and organizational performance is an important issue in the domain of Human Resource Management. Scholars strive hard to uncover it. After 2007's financial storm, they try to uncover it from the perspective of human resource flexibility which stems from the practices of HPWS and thereafter turns out to be organizational performance through employees relative behaviors, thus it mediates the relationship between HPWS and organizational performance, particularly it emphasizes on flexible response to external environment. In this vein the paper makes an empirical examination of 110 Chinese organizations on the relationship among them, the results confirm that HPWS has a positive effect on organizational performance and human resource flexibility (employee skill flexibility, employee behavior flexibility and human resource practice flexibility) partially mediate the relationship between HPWS and organizational performance.