Abstract

This research contributes to the debate in the human resources management (HRM) literature by examining the impact of some HRM practices on workers’ overall job satisfaction and the determinants of workers’ perception of discrimination. The novelty of our study consists in the deepening of the relation between HRM practices and the employees’ perception of discrimination in workplace: a largely unexplored topic, until now. Our aim is to add value to existing literature by assessing the synergy effect between perception of discrimination and HRM practices on workers’ job satisfaction, performing a probit regression analysis of a selection of variables drawn from the sixth wave of European Working Condition Survey data, collected in 2015. We also provide a comparison of different types of discrimination, examining the moderating effect of the perception of discrimination on the relationship between HRM practices and employees’ job satisfaction, assuming that the strength of the above relation is weaker for discriminated workers. Our findings highlight that HRM practices we analysed (except for autonomy of the work-group and job-intensity) have a positive impact on workers’ satisfaction and reduce the perception of discrimination. Moreover, we find that the perception of every kind of discrimination have a negative impact on workers’ job satisfaction. Our results also suggest that the perception of discrimination has a moderator role in the relation between HRM practices and job satisfaction. Policy implications are finally discussed.

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