Abstract: Socially responsible human resource management (SRHRM) represented an important direction for sustainable human resource management, but existing research conclusions regarding its impact on employees were inconsistent and even contradictory. Based on 109 independent studies (N = 55,076) from 105 empirical articles, this study employed a meta-analysis to quantitatively integrate the effect sizes of the relationships between SRHRM and a range of employee work outcomes across three levels—attitude, well-being, and performance—while examining the influence of national cultural differences and study design characteristics as boundary conditions. The results indicated that SRHRM had a significant strong positive relationship with employees’ organization-targeted attitude, such as organizational commitment, but a significant moderate positive relationship with job-targeted attitude, such as job satisfaction; that it showed a significant strong positive correlation with psychological well-being, while the correlation with health-related well-being was not significant; that it was significantly strongly positively related to organizational citizenship behavior, significantly moderately positively related to in-role performance, proactive behavior, and prosocial behavior, and significantly weakly negatively related to deviant behavior; and that research methods(cross-sectional design versus longitudinal design), analysis level(multi-level design versus single-level design), and national culture(long-term versus short-term orientation) all moderated the relationship between SRHRM and a subset of the aforementioned outcomes. This study filled the gap in the systematic quantitative integration of SRHRM and employee work outcomes while also revealing boundary conditions for prior inconsistent findings, thereby laying a foundation for future research.

Key words: Socially responsible human resource management, Employee work outcomes, National cultural difference, Study design characteristics, Meta-analysis