Resumo

Considering the impact of Human Resources Management practices in organizational results, the role of leadership and the need of understanding human behavior and social interactions in the work context, combining the importance of behaviors not prescribed by the formal system to the organizational strategy, we see the rise of organizational virtues and organizational citizenship behaviors. Despite the importance of these variables for strategic HRM practices, such relationships are still underexplored, conforming the literature gap pursuit by the present study.

This paper intends to answer the following question: what is the relationship between leadership, organizational virtues, human resources management practices, and organizational citizenship behaviors? To address such interrogation, our main objective is to identify the relationship between leadership, organizational virtues, human resources management practices, and organizational citizenship behaviors in a sample of employees from public and private companies. Seven hypotheses were developed in order to reach such purpose.

The theoretical background is based on the idea that HRM practices must be established and implemented by an active leader capable of inspiring and directing the behavior of employees towards greater professional achievement and the achievement of better organizational results. We follow this notion along with Barney's Resource-Based View: workers who are aware of the ethical behavior of their leaders tend to present organizational citizenship behaviors, as they learn social behavior through the repeated observation of leadership, additionally to their perception of organizational virtues.

The paper reports a survey with 659 employees from public and private organizations in Brazil, using a questionnaire formed by four scientific validated scales to measure HRM practices, leadership, organizational virtues and organizational citizenship behaviors. For data analysis, we performed confirmatory factor analysis to assess the adjustment of the measurement models of the variables. To specify and estimate the mediation models, we used path analysis through structural equation modeling.

The analyses of the findings confirmed the seven hypotheses of this study, confirming the positive association between leadership and HRM practices, leadership and organizational citizenship behaviors, the positive impact of HRM practices and organizational citizenship behaviors and the relationship between organizational virtues and HRM practices. We also confirmed the partial mediation of HRM practices in the relationship between leadership and citizenship, and the total mediation on the relationship between virtues and citizenship.

Our study achieved the proposed general objective since the seven research hypotheses were confirmed. Our work represents an initial effort to investigate the still unexplored relationships between leadership, organizational virtues, human resources management practices, and organizational citizenship behaviors. We also proposed structural models of mediation between the variables, with the opportunity to inspire new studies that make progress in testing associations between different variables of positive psychology.

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