Resumo

Considering the purpose of seeking the recognition of the strategic role of the modern human resources management in organizations, we explore the relation between leadership, organizational virtues and human resource management practices. We developed this research based on the idea that leadership has a major influence on HRM practices, the connection between organizational virtues and leadership, the association between organizational virtues and HRM practices, we foreseeing the possibility of organizational virtues acting as mediating variable between leadership and HRM practices.

Although literature signalizes the relation between leadership, organizational virtues and human resource management practices, such association remains unexplored. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to test a structural model of mediation between leadership and human resource management, being organizational virtues the mediating variable. As a secondary objective, we analyze the effect of leadership on organizational virtues, the effect of organizational virtues on human resource management practices and the effect of leadership on human resource management practices.

We build our research model based on the research streams under the human resource management literature: leadership, considering the relationship between leader and team members; organizational virtues and its contribution to the improvement of the workplace and the social relations it embraces; and HRM practices and its focus on promoting actions in the collective level

To test our research model and its four hypothesis, we performed a survey with 673 employees from different sectors of the economy in Brazil. We administered a questionnaire composed of items from three scientific validated scales, comprising leadership, organizational virtues and human resource management practices. We resorted to Structural Equation Modeling to analyze the data, using confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis.

The four hypothesis were confirmed, revealing the positive effect of leadership on organizational virtues, the influence of organizational virtues on HRM practices and the impact of leadership on HRM practices. Findings also show that organizational virtues mediate the relationship between leadership and human resource management practices.

This study has achieved its main purpose, since the four hypothesis of the research model were confirmed, revealing the effect of leadership on organizational virtues and the effect of organizational virtues on HRM practices, besides confirming the mediating role of organizational virtues on the relation between leadership and HRM practices. This research represents a seminal step in the investigation of joint relationship between these variables and intends to inspire new investigations that consolidate the tests of relationships between different variables of organizational behavior.

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