Employee perceptions of HR practices: A critical review and future directions

Abstract

Scholars are directing more attention to employee percep tions of human resources (HR) practices and have explored issues such as whether and how employees’ idiosyncratic or collective perceptions of HR practices shape employee out comes. To further this area of research, we seek to deter mine what authors mean when they refer to “employee perceptions of HR practices”. We review 105 articles from leading human resource management journals and find that employee perceptions of HR practices is not a mono lithic concept. Rather, following previous scholars, we iden tify three distinct components of employee perceptions of HR practices: the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’. We critically sum marize extant literature on these three components of employee HR perception and propose future research direc tions, including enriching the theoretical foundations of HR communication, embracing cross-national contexts, and enhancing practical relevance.