Does High Involvement Management Drive Affective Commitment? Causal Tests on System Coherence and Complementarity

An employee's affective commitment to the firm is a key driver of individual and, ultimately, firm performance. We study the role of high involvement management (HIM) practices in promoting affective commitment and ask if different components of HIM, specifically power, information, rewards, and knowledge, form a coherent management system and/or are complementary across components. Coherence implies that the components are not in conflict with or substitute for each other, i.e., adding them individually generates additional positive returns, while complementarity implies that the returns from adding one component increase with the number of other components already in place. We use detailed and unique data from a large sample of German firms and their employees and find that while HIM is a coherent management system, there are no strong complementarities across practices.