Happy Workers, Healthy Business: The Impact of Sustainable Human Resource Management and Workplace Happiness on Employee Engagement of Women Employees in Tea Plantations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The title of the manuscript is difficult to understand because it is very long, although perhaps it is intended to be presented in a marketing way.

The abstract is also long and needs to be shortened. Although the purpose is presented in the introduction, it is not clear what research questions are being addressed, what methodological approach was applied. The literature review begins with a subsection on sustainable HRM practices. It is not entirely clear why because the objective states to identify effective HRM practices that promote employee happiness. At least the text does not reveal any connection between coherent HRM practices and employee happiness. In particular, the author cites that sustainable HRM involves adapting traditional HRM techniques and practices to achieve long-term monetary, environmental, and organizational goals while minimizing negative consequences (Kramar, 2014). Sub-section 2.2 is also a suitable but very limited literature analysis. Of course, even if there is a lack of literature, it is necessary to look closely at research on happiness, because when people spend most of their time at work, seeing it is related to work. Subsection 2.3 is very limited, I would recommend the author to take inspiration from here: Civinskas, R., & Dvorak, J. (2019). In search of employee perspective: understanding how Lithuanian companies use employee representatives to adopt company's decisions. Administrative Sciences, 9(4), 78. and Civinskas, R., & Dvorak, J. (2017). New social cooperation model in service oriented economy: the case of employee financial participation in the Baltic states. Engineering Management in Production and Services, 9(3), 37-50.

Conclusions are disproportionately small and weak, management implications are lacking. References must be organized according to the MDPI style.

all the best

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

                     First of all  I express my heartfelt gratitude for reviewing my research article and providing me with useful comments and insights to improve my research article.

The following are the changes made as per the comments provided:

1. The title of my research paper has been altered according to the comments.
2. The abstract has been shortened with all the relevant information as addressed by the reviewer.
3. Subsection 2.2 and 2.3 has been added with additional reviews  and insights provided by the reviewer to gather inspiration from the two authors mentioned are also added.
4. Kramar's view of SHRM is added in the research article in order to it emphasizes the holistic approach that Sustainable HRM takes beyond traditional HRM practices.
5. Additional inputs for implications and conclusion are also added.
6. The reference has been modified as per MDPI Style.

All the necessary and relevant changes are being implemented as per the reviewers comments.

 

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article examines the relationships between sustainable human resource management (SHRM) practices, employee happiness, and employee engagement, showing the correlation of these first two variables with employee engagement.

 

The text is a revised version of the article (sustainability-3324089) and the reviewer appreciates the efforts  and changes the authors have made. At the same time, he notes that:

- there are traces of the old article (Additionally, HAW significantly mediates the impact of 603 SHRM on EE (β=0.65, p<.01) lines 603-604) despite the fact that there are no such hypotheses in the current one, nor does presented results contain this data

- H2 and H3 are not justified in the text - the literature review around these hypotheses does not provide a clear chain of arguments with these hypotheses, and informs about many studies using one of the concepts from these hypotheses (correlations of this concept with concepts not analyzed in the hypothesis)

- H4 Relationship between Sustainable human resource practices and employee happiness influences employee engagement model assessment using SEM PLS is not a hypothesis

- Figure 1 contains undefined terms (R)14i, (R)17i, (R)16i

- the abstract contains evaluative phrases that have no justification in the text of the article “Empirical findings demonstrate a strong and crucial role of SHRM and employee happiness in promoting employee engagement” (lines 15-16)

- The Practical Implication and Conclusion subsection contains statements that are not justified in the text:

·         A key finding from the research is the strong positive correlation between a human- 687 oriented work atmosphere and employee engagement (line 687-688)

·         companies can significantly enhance employee engagement, leading to better overall performance. (lines 700-701) – the causal relationship between employee engagement AND overall performance was not investigated in the paper, and the variable “performance” does not appear in the empirical study

 

The reviewer would like to repeat his main comment, which he made for the previous version of the article. The problem studied is important, the study is well-conducted, but the article is poorly written (and edited) and cannot be published yet, even in this version.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

                        First of all I would like to express my sincere thanks for reviewing my paper and I have tried my best to make the relevant changes as per the comments provided.

The following are the changes I have implemented  in the revised paper:

1. The old traces which were added in the corrected version by mistake is corrected now.
2. The justification for the hypothesis H2 and H3 are added.
3. Figure 1 has been modified and the undefined terms are removed
4. The practical implication and conclusion section has been improvised with adequate justification.
5. Even though variable "performance" does not appear in the study, SHRM and HAW as well as EE tends to increase the performance of employees in the long run.

 

To the best of my knowledge, I have made all the adequate changes and corrections as the comments. Once again I thank the reviewers for helping me to improvise my research article.

Reviewer 3 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author(s) have revised the paper as advised. I am satisfied about the revisions made.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

                    First of all I take this opportunity to thank the reviewer for reviewing my research paper and giving me positive comments. My sincere gratitude and thanks. I have implementing all the changes as per the reviewer comments.

Once again thanks for the positive feedback provided

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for implementing the recommendations.

All the best

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 have some suggestons to the authors: 

Than you for giving the chance to review the paper.  There are some suggestions to the authors:

·         The title of the paper should be modified. Why employee engagement is mentioned in the hypotheses but not in the title?

·         Abstract: citations and statistics of the results should be removed.

·         The contribution of this study to the literature is not strong enough. What are the gaps existing in previous studies? How does the paper address them?

·         The authors should mention the full name of construct in Figure 1 instead of the abbreviations.

·         To ensure the validity of the collected data, authors should perform normality, homoscedasticity, and non-response bias tests. Additionally, they should provide sufficient demographic information in a table format.
How and when the questionnaire was distributed should be included, which may affect the validity of the findings.

·         Common method bias is not addressed in the results.

·         The findings should be presented in a form of paragraph instead of bullet points.

·         Discussion section is very poor. The author(s) dd not support or discuss the results with those of past studies. The results should be compared to those of similar previous studies.

·         There is no deep dive discussion section.

·         Theoretical implications should be included.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Than you for giving the chance to review the paper.  There are some suggestions to the authors:

·         The title of the paper should be modified. Why employee engagement is mentioned in the hypotheses but not in the title?

·         Abstract: citations and statistics of the results should be removed.

·         The contribution of this study to the literature is not strong enough. What are the gaps existing in previous studies? How does the paper address them?

·         The authors should mention the full name of construct in Figure 1 instead of the abbreviations.

·         To ensure the validity of the collected data, authors should perform normality, homoscedasticity, and non-response bias tests. Additionally, they should provide sufficient demographic information in a table format.
How and when the questionnaire was distributed should be included, which may affect the validity of the findings.

·         Common method bias is not addressed in the results.

·         The findings should be presented in a form of paragraph instead of bullet points.

·         Discussion section is very poor. The author(s) dd not support or discuss the results with those of past studies. The results should be compared to those of similar previous studies.

·         There is no deep dive discussion section.

·         Theoretical implications should be included.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article examines the relationships between sustainable human resource management (SHRM) practices, employee happiness, and employee engagement, showing the correlation of these first two variables with employee engagement. The authors also claim - which they emphasize in the abstract - that there is an “Indirect relationship: HAW significantly mediates the impact of SHRM on EE (β = 0.65)” (lines 445-446).

There are no statistical analyzes or arguments for such mediation in the text, neither the hypothesis about it.

The article is interesting and well-written in the introductory parts, so the reviewer draws strong conclusions, although the article is worth improving. The reviewer notices a number of shortcomings that prevent him from reviewing the article thoroughly.

H1 is based on one item from the literature (Studies have shown that implementing SHRM practices can improve employee happiness (Morgan et al., 2003) – lines 282-283), BUT this item is missing in the References. The remaining arguments are aimed at pointing out the non-obviousness of this hypothesis. H3 has no argument in the text, only indications that various individual HR practices may affect employee engagement and performance. Literature cited in 2.2. is highly insufficient and there is a lack of a broader analysis of approaches to happiness in the workplace alternative to Diener's concept and contemporary literature discussing this concept. The abstract is written incorrectly - the tools used to study the variables in the abstract are not provided.   Due to the fact that the article seems to omit argumentation (and statistical justification) for its important result, and also contains a number of formal shortcomings, it should be rejected in this version. At least these positions are missed in the list of literature but  cited in the text:

Morgan et al., 2003

Sypniewska et 175 al., 2023

Bombiak et al., 294 2019;

Hristova et al., 2020

Ehnert's (2009

Singh & Aggarwal, 2017)