Mediating role of organizational commitment in the relationship between human resource management practices and employee engagement: Does black box stage exist?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of organizational commitment (OC) on the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and employee engagement among banking employees in the context of an emerging economy namely Bangladesh.

The survey data include 383 employees from 30 private commercial banks in Bangladesh. For analyzing the data, structural equation modeling is employed with the bootstrapping method.

This study finds that HRM practices such as career advancement, employee participation, job security, performance feedback, rewards and recognition, training and development are the significant predictors of employee engagement. Results also identify OC as a partial mediator on HRM practices and employee engagement relationship which suggest that direct relationship of predictors and criterion variables are stronger than indirect association. More interestingly, findings indicate that the mechanism of black-box stage is not always work on the relationship between HRM practices and employee performance.

Exploring the role of OC on the relationship between HRM practices and employees’ behavioral outcome, i.e. employee engagement, is appeared as an initial effort in the academic literature. Furthermore, empirical research that examines the association of different organizational factors with employee engagement through OC is rarely been investigated. Thus, the findings of this study act as a strategic tool for the bank managers to design their organizational policies in such a way that fosters their employee’ level of engagement.