{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T04:31:02Z","timestamp":1786681862326,"version":"build-2736575974"},"reference-count":45,"publisher":"Frontiers Media SA","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1786665600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["frontiersin.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Front. Psychol."],"abstract":"<jats:p>Employee well-being has become a strategic imperative as organizations worldwide confront rising burnout, disengagement, and the human costs of intensified competition. Yet organizations face a paradox: the high-performance work systems (HPWS) they adopt to remain competitive may either nourish or erode the well-being of the employees who enact them. Motivated by this tension, this study investigates not only whether HPWS influences employees\u2019 subjective well-being (SWB), but also how and when this influence occurs. Drawing on self-determination theory, it proposes that HPWS enhances SWB by satisfying employees\u2019 basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, thereby strengthening their emotional commitment to the organization, and that interpersonal fairness \u2013 the need-supportive quality of day-to-day interpersonal treatment \u2013 conditions this process. Three-wave, multi-source data were collected from 412 employees across 68 teams in Chinese technology companies, and the hypothesized moderated mediation model was tested using hierarchical linear modeling and bootstrap methods. The results revealed that: (1) HPWS positively influences employees\u2019 SWB; (2) emotional commitment partially mediates this relationship; (3) interpersonal fairness moderates the HPWS-emotional commitment link, such that the positive effect is stronger when interpersonal fairness is high; and (4) the indirect effect of HPWS on SWB through emotional commitment is likewise stronger when interpersonal fairness is high. These findings extend self-determination theory into the strategic human resource management domain by identifying emotional commitment as a need-based transmission mechanism and interpersonal fairness as a need-supportive boundary condition, and they offer actionable guidance for designing HPWS that pursue performance goals without sacrificing employee well-being. By responding to recent calls for mechanism-focused and context-sensitive HRM-well-being research, the study shows how performance systems can be designed to serve both organizational and employee interests.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3389\/fpsyg.2026.1807123","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T04:23:39Z","timestamp":1786681419000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3389\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["The impact of high-performance work systems on employees\u2019 subjective well-being: the mediating effect of emotional commitment and the moderating effect of interpersonal fairness"],"prefix":"10.3389","volume":"17","author":[{"given":"Rongcheng","family":"Liang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Emergency Management Training, Party School of the Communist Party of China Shandong Provincial Committee (Shandong Academy of Governance)","place":["Jinan, China"]},{"name":"School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University","place":["Shanghai, China"]}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1965","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]]},"reference":[{"key":"B1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"3787","DOI":"10.1080\/09585192.2022.2157681","article-title":"Linking high-performance work systems to affective commitment, job satisfaction, and career satisfaction: Thriving as a mediator and wasta as a moderator.","volume":"34","author":"Alothmany","year":"2023","journal-title":"Int. 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