Human resources practices and continuous improvement and learning across cultures

We developed a conceptual model of relationships among learning-focused human resource management practices, small group problem solving, and continuous improvement and learning across national cultures. Our underlying theory draws on the insights from the social process perspective of organizational learning and the in-group collectivism dimension of national culture (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta, 2004). We tested our model using a sample of 238 manufacturing plants operating across three industries and nine countries. Our results reveal that in low in-group collectivism cultures, learning-focused human resource management practices directly affect continuous improvement and learning and indirectly through the mediation of small group problem-solving. In contrast, in high in-group collectivist cultures, we found that the effects of these human resource management practices are entirely mediated by small group problem-solving.