High Performance Work Systems and Organizational Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Information Quality

Using data on registered nurses and nursing assistants in 50 acute-care hospital units, the author explores the relationships among high performance work systems, information quality, and performance quality within a context shaped by equivocal information—information that can be interpreted in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. He finds that the quality of information available for decision-making, which largely depends on the interpretative skills of the workers who are exposed to important equivocal information, partially mediates how employee knowledge, work design, and total quality management systems affect organizational performance (which is measured as the inverse of medication error incidence). Providing employees with extensive relevant knowledge and enabling them to use their skills during even seemingly routine tasks improves the effective quality of information they bring to decision-making, and thereby promotes high performance quality.