THE IMPACTS OF HRM PRACTICES ON EMPLOYEE OUTCOMES: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF HRM EFFECTIVENESS

Purpose: This study aimed to examine the impacts of human resource management (HRM) practices on employee outcomes (employee commitment, employee satisfaction, and employee turnover intention) through HRM effectiveness. Theoretical Framework: The literature recognized the importance of HRM effectiveness in achieving both organizational outcomes and employee outcomes. Numerous variables were examined as mediating variables between HRM practices and organizational as well as employee outcomes such as work attitudes, employee engagement, knowledge management, employee performance, and HRM effectiveness. Method: Collecting data using a questionnaire-based survey from a convenient sample of employees. Results and conclusion: The results pointed out a significant direct effect of HRM practices on employee job satisfaction and insignificant direct effects of HRM practices on employee commitment and employee turnover intention. Also, the results revealed that the impact of HRM practices on employee satisfaction is partially mediated by HRM effectiveness and the impacts of HRM practices on employee commitment and employee turnover intention are fully mediated by HRM effectiveness. Hence, it was concluded that employee outcomes are positively related to the extent to which HRM practices are effectively executed. Research implications: The organizations are required to expand their HRM practices bundle and appraise HRM practices in numerous areas including employee succession planning, talent development, employee empowerment, quality enhancement management, performance management, as well as merit-based training and promotion. Originality/value: This study puts emphasis on the role of HRM practices on employee outcomes such as employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention.

HRM practices have been categorized into groups such as traditional or technical HRM and strategic HRM practices (Huselid et al., 1997;Çalişkan, 2010;Al-Ayed, 2019;de Miranda Castro et al., 2020).For Huselid et al. (1997), technical HRM practices include employee recruitment and selection, employee training and development, performance appraisal, and compensation management while strategic HRM practices take account of team-based job designs, flexible workforce, employee empowerment, and talent development (Huselid et al., 1997).Çalişkan (2010) defined strategic HRM practices as integrated HRM practices into the overall strategy of the organization.Al-Ayed (2019) conceptualized strategic HRM practices in terms of the strategic value of HR practices, HR analytics, and high performance work systems (HPWS).de Miranda Castro et al. (2020) put emphasis on the importance of strategic HRM practices as a straight up link between HRM practices and the organizational strategy.
According to Al-Tit et al. (2022), employee development practices consist of three HR bundles: skill-enhancing practices (e.g., employee recruitment and selection, and employee training and development), empowerment-enhancing (e.g., employee participation in decision-making processes, and information sharing), and motivation-enhancing practices (e.g., incentives management and performance feedback).Performing such practices (i.e., technical and strategic HRM practices) in an operative and effectual manner refers to HRM effectiveness 4 (Huselid et al., 1997;Richard and Johnson, 2004).Simply, HRM effectiveness signifies HRM contribution the achievement of the organizational goals (Huselid et al., 1997;Richard and Johnson, 2004;Ruël et al., 2007;Sulochana & Sajeewanie, 2015).
Basically, a significant vein of the literature recognized the importance of HRM effectiveness in achieving both organizational outcomes (Ruël et al., 2007;Hoffmann, 2014) and employee outcomes (Guest & Conway, 2011).Numerous variables were examined as mediating variables between HRM practices and organizational as well as employee outcomes such as work attitudes (Ko & Smith-Walter, 2013), employee engagement (Taib et al., 2018), knowledge management (Al-Tit, 2016), employee performance (Amjad et al., 2021;Halawi et al., 2024), and HRM effectiveness (Guest & Conway, 2011).However, little empirical studies were carried out to investigate the mediating role of HRM effectiveness between HRM practices and employee outcomes, particularly, employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention.Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the mediating role of HRM effectiveness in order to expand the theoretical foundation on the contribution of HRM practices to employee outcomes and organizational outcomes and to deliver empirical results on the contribution of HRM effectiveness to the implementation of HRM practices.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
HRM practices characterize a system of employee behavior setting in which employees are inspired, satisfied and committed to spend more effort to help the organization achieving its goals (Mira et al., 2019;Cherif, 2020).Examples of these practices embrace supervision, job training, and pay practices (Mudor, 2011), employee training, incentives, selective hiring, job security, and self-managed teams (Anwar & Abdullah, 2021), training and development, job analysis, rewards, recruitment and selection, social support, employee relations, and employee empowerment (Mira et al., 2019), training opportunities (Dysvik & Kuvaas, 2008), employee involvement, growth and development, health and safety, and employee recognition (Grawitch et al., 2007), performance appraisal, teamwork, compensation, training, and employee participation (Jeet & Sayeeduzzafar, 2014), compensation policy, information sharing, job security, training and development (Cherif, 2020), employee promotion, compensation, performance appraisal, training and development (Aburumman et al., 2020), employee participation, information sharing, performance feedback, and incentives management (Al-Tit et al., 2022), team-based job designs, flexible workforce, employee empowerment, and talent development (Huselid et al., 1997).
Employee commitment refers to employees' obligation to be dedicated to assist their organizations to achieve organizational goals (Cherif, 2020).It refers to an employee's affective reactions to the characteristics of the organization in which he or she works (Savaneviciene & Stankeviciute, 2011).Job satisfaction refers to the degree of employee happiness with the job (Sykes, 2015;Putra et al., 2024) or employee feelings about his or her job (Mudor, 2011).
Finally, turnover intention refers to a state in which an employee assesses the organization based on his or her gains and losses (Mudor, 2011).
Generally, effectiveness is a sign of an activity achievement (Hoffmann, 2014).Henri (2004( , cited in Hoffmann, 2014: 9) : 9) described organizational effectiveness as an outcome of organizational activities and can be measured by organizational performance.Such a statement means that HRM effectiveness is related to how well HRM activities are practiced.Clearly, HRM effectiveness has been defined as the contribution that the management of human resources to organizational goals such as organizational performance (Ruël et al., 2007).Richard and Johnson (2004) defined HRM effectiveness as the degree of satisfaction with HRM activities.HRM effectiveness has been operationalized as a construct of two dimensions: traditional or technical HRM effectiveness and strategic HRM effectiveness (Huselid et al., 1997).On the one hand, technical HRM effectiveness refers to extent to which HRM activities are accomplished, or in other words, the role of HRM in supporting the organization's needs (Sulochana & Sajeewanie, 2015).Examples of technical HRM practices take account of employee recruitment and selection, employee training and development, performance appraisal, and compensation management (Huselid et al., 1997).On the other hand, strategic HRM effectiveness refers to the development of aligned policies with business strategy by which employee behavior is enhanced to support the organizational outcomes (Ruël et al., 2007).sharing (Cherif, 2020), supervision, job training, and pay practices (Mudor, 2011), training and development, rewards, job analysis, employee recruitment and selection, social support, employee relations, and employee empowerment (Mira et al., 2019), training, performance appraisal, teamwork, and compensation (Jeet & Sayeeduzzafar, 2014), employee skills, motivation, and engagement improvement (Savaneviciene & Stankeviciute, 2011), recruitment and selection, training and development, and performance appraisal (Javed et al., 2019).Finally, prior works revealed that HRM practices have negative effects on employee outcomes such as employee turnover intention (ETI).That is, such an intention is significantly affected by practices like employee compensation, performance appraisal, training and development, and employee promotion (Aburumman et al., 2020).Therefore, it was hypothesized that: H1: HRM practices will have a positive effect on EC.H2: HRM practices will have a positive effect on ES.H3: HRM practices will have a negative effect on ETI.
Good management of HR practices is crucial for ensuring constructive employee outcomes (Savaneviciene & Stankeviciute, 2011;Jeet & Sayeeduzzafar, 2014;Mira et al., 2019;Javed et al., 2019;Coffie et al., 2018;Cherif, 2020;Aburumman et al., 2020).Nevertheless, one key condition to ensure significant consequences of HRM practices is HRM effectiveness (Huselid et al., 1997;Richard and Johnson, 2004;Ruël et al., 2007;Sulochana & Sajeewanie, 2015).A basic reason behind the importance role of HRM effectiveness is twofold.First, HRM effectiveness postulates that organizations are required to deliver high-quality HRM practices, or in other words, performing effective activities of HRM (Huselid et al., 1997;Richard and Johnson, 2004).Second, HRM effectiveness supports organizations to reach their organizational outcomes (Hoffmann, 2014;Sulochana & Sajeewanie, 2015).Therefore, it was anticipated that HRM effectiveness plays a significant mediating role between HRM practices and employee outcomes, i.e., employee commitment (EC), employee satisfaction (ES), and employee turnover intention (ETI), as presumed in the following hypotheses: H4: HRM effectiveness significantly mediates the effect of HRM practices on EC.H5: HRM effectiveness significantly mediates the effect of HRM practices on ES.H6: HRM effectiveness significantly mediates the effect of HRM practices on ETI.indicators.Hence, a total of 300 respondents were selected as a sample for this research.
Gathering data through a questionnaire yielded 257 usable responses for data analysis purposes after excluding 43 responses as outliers.
The current research consists of five variables: HRM practices, HRM effectiveness, employee commitment, employee satisfaction, and employee turnover intention.As shown in Table 1, six items were used to measure HRM practices based on previous works (Zhang & Morris, 2014;Al-Tit et al., 2022;Grawitch et al., 2007).Also, six items were adapted from Huselid et al. (1997) to assess HRM effectiveness.Employee outcomes were evaluated using 15 items distributed at employee commitment (5 items), employee satisfaction (5 items), and employee turnover intention (5 items).These items were adapted from previous studies as shown in Table 1.All items were anchored using five-point Likert scale from 1 (fully disagree) to 5 (fully agree).It should be noted that all items were positively stated except the items of employee turnover intention.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results of collinearity, reliability, validity and model fit as made known in Table 2 indicate that the values of variance inflation factor (VIF) were less than 3, the values of validity measures as factor loadings and average variance (AVE) were higher than 0.50, and the values of reliability indices as composite reliability (CR) and Cronbach's alpha coefficient (α) were greater than 0.7.As well, values model fit indices as Stone-Geiser's (Q 2 ) were higher than zero (Al-Ayed & Al-Tit, 2021), and the determination coefficient (R 2 ) were high for HRM effectiveness (R 2 = 0.343) and employee commitment (R 2 = 0.428) and low for employee job satisfaction (R 2 = 0.148) and employee turnover intention (R 2 = 0.157).These results point out that the current measurement scale is usable to gather research data and the current model is valid to test research hypotheses.Using Smart PLS 3.0 software as it does not assume normally distributed data (Ringle et al., 2012), the results of hypotheses testing as summarized in Table 3 revealed that the first hypothesis (H1) on the direct impact of HRM practices on employee commitment was not supported (β = 0.0.083,t-value = 1.266, p-value = 0.206), the second hypothesis (H2) on the direct impact of HRM practices on employee job satisfaction was supported (β = 0.174, t-value = 2.435, p-value = 0.015), and the third hypothesis (H3) on the direct impact of HRM practices on employee turnover intention was not supported (β = 0.077, t-value = 1.107, p-value = 0.269).
These direct effects are illustrated in Figure 1 as path coefficients.The aforementioned results suggest a significant mediating role of HRM effectiveness between HRM practices and employee outcomes.As represented in Table 3, the results of specific indirect effects disclose significant indirect effects of HRM practices through HRM effectiveness on employee commitment (β = 0.353, t-value = 6.226, p-value = 0.002), employee job satisfaction (β = 0.150, t-value = 3.145, p-value = 0.000), and employee turnover intention (β = 0.203, t-value = 4.024, p-value = 0.000).Therefore, hypothesis H4, H5, and H6 were accepted, which means that HRM effectiveness is significantly mediated the effect of HRM practices on employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention.Investigating the impact of HRM practices on three employee outcomes, i.e., employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention using HRM effectiveness as a mediating variable as stated in research hypotheses, the results revealed that HRM practices had a significant direct effect on employee job satisfaction and had no significant direct effects on both employee commitment and employee turnover intention.Bringing HRM effectiveness together as a mediating variable transformed the effects of HRM practices on employee outcomes into significant effects.HRM practices have significant total effects on employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, employee turnover intention.Such total effects are divided into insignificant direct effects and significant indirect effects through HRM effectiveness on employee commitment and employee turnover intention, and a significant direct effect and an indirect significant effect through HRM effectiveness on employee job satisfaction.In fact, these results indicate that the impacts of HRM practices on employee commitment and employee turnover intention are fully mediated by HRM effectiveness and the impact of HRM practices on employee job satisfaction is partially mediated by HRM effectiveness.

CONCLUSION
In agreement with the results of the current study, there is a significant effect of HRM practices on employee job satisfaction (Jeet & Sayeeduzzafar, 2014;Mira et al., 2019;Savaneviciene & Stankeviciute, 2011;Javed et al., 2019;Cherif, 2020).In contrast to the current results, HRM practices have significant direct effects on both employee commitment (Coffie et al., 2018;Cherif, 2020) and employee turnover intention (Aburumman et al., 2020).Regarding the mediating role of HRM effectiveness in the relationship between HRM practices and employee outcomes, previous studies (e.g., Savaneviciene & Stankeviciute, 2011;Jeet & Sayeeduzzafar, 2014;Mira et al., 2019;Javed et al., 2019;Coffie et al., 2018;Cherif, 2020;Aburumman et al., 2020) took HRM effectiveness as a key factor to ensure good HRM practices.On the basis of these results, it was established that employee outcomes are positively related to the extent to which HRM practices are effectively executed.
Theoretically, the current study puts emphasis on the role of HRM practices on employee outcomes such as employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention.It main contribution to the body of knowledge about HRM practices is that it expands our understanding of how well human resource practices are managed to ensure positive impacts of such practices.It was acknowledged that executing HRM practices without bearing in mind the effectiveness of these practices does not guarantee positive employee outcomes.That is, the impacts of HRM practices on employee outcomes are fully mediated by HRM effectiveness, at least for employee commitment and employee turnover intention.Hence, researchers when examining the links between HRM practices and employee outcomes should consider other pivotal factors such as HRM effectiveness.Empirically, HRM practitioners should utilize both traditional and strategic human resource practices in parallel to attain positive consequences from human capital, which in turn lift the organizational goals up.Here, organizations are required to expand their HRM practices bundle and appraise HRM practices in numerous areas including employee succession planning, talent development, employee empowerment, quality enhancement management, performance management, as well as meritbased training and promotion.
Caution should be considered when interpreting the current results due to some limitations.Firstly, HRM practices is regarded as a single construct and measured using six 12 items.In future studies, HRM practices can be divided into specific practices such as employee training and development, compensation and reward management practices, employee participation and empowerment.Secondly, the results are subject to research measurements in which all variables were measured based on a quantitative scale.Therefore, a mixed method study can be adopted to carry out quantitative-qualitative research using questionnaire-based survey and interviews with both managers and employees to gain deep understanding of the impact of HRM practices on employee outcomes in the presence of HRM effectiveness as a mediating variable.Thirdly, three employee outcomes were selected for the current research: employee commitment, employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention, hence, researchers are invited to consider other outcomes such as employee performance and job stress.
Research on the impacts of HRM practices show that employee commitment (EC) is positively related to numerous HRM practices such as performance-based pay, training and The Impacts of HRM Practices on Employee Outcomes: The Mediating Role of HRM Effectiveness ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1-15 | e06313 | 2024.6 development, performance appraisal, employee recognition and rewards, communication and information sharing, as well as recruitment and selection (Coffie et al., 2018), job security, compensation, employee training and development, and information sharing (Cherif, 2020).Moreover, it was observed that employee satisfaction (ES) is significantly influenced by HR practices such as job security, compensation, employee training and development, and information

The
Impacts of HRM Practices on Employee Outcomes: The Mediating Role of HRM Effectiveness ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1-15 | e06313 | 2024.7 3 METHODOLOGYA convenient sample of employees working at business firms was recruited to collect research data.Such a sampling technique was employed in previous works to examine the impacts of HRM practices on employee outcomes(Mira et al., 2019;Cherif, 2020).As a rule of thumb, at least 10 responses is required for each indicator(Alotaibi & Aloud, 2023).The minimum sample size of the current research should be 250 responses as it encompasses 25

Figure 1
Figure 1Research structural model

Table 1
Research scale items and references I have a strong desire to maintain my membership with this organization.I am committed to helping to achieve my organization's goals.I am dedicated to helping to solve my organization's problems.The current work conditions trigger me to become highly committed.I prefer another better job.The degree of my job satisfaction is affected by HRM practices.I am satisfied with the current practices of human resource management.Overall, I am satisfied with my current job.

Table 2
Results of collinearity, reliability, validity and model fitPrepared by the researcher based on the outputs of the statistical program SmartPLS 4 The Impacts of HRM Practices on Employee Outcomes: The Mediating Role of HRM Effectiveness ___________________________________________________________________________ Rev. Gest.Soc.Ambient.| Miami | v.18.n.1 | p.1-15 | e06313 | 2024.