Human resource practices and coercive control interact to predict CWB: A meta-ethnographic study

Drawing on ideas from the resource based view of the firm, the notion of gift exchange, and efficiency wage theory, we examine the relationship between high- performance human resources practices (HPHRP) and employee counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We also examine whether HPHRP interact with coercive control systems to predict these outcomes. Using meta- ethnographic data collected from 149 organizational ethnographies, we found that HPHRP and coercive control interacted such that the negative association between HPHRP and CWB was buffered by coercive control. Further analysis indicates that this interaction remained even after controlling for the monetary rewards paid to employees, suggesting that the interactions we detected were largely driven by nonmonetary HPHRP as opposed to monetary HPHRP.