Leadership and Human Resources Management Practices: The mediating role of organizational virtues

Abstract Considering the unexplored relationship between leadership, organizational virtues, and human resource management practices, the purpose of this paper is to test a structural model of mediation between leadership and human resource management, being organizational virtues the mediating variable. We performed a survey with 673 employees in Brazil, resorting to Structural Equation Modeling to analyze the data. Findings show that organizational virtues mediate the relationship between leadership and HRM practices. We confirm the positive effect of leadership on organizational virtues, the influence of organizational virtues on HRM practices, and the impact of leadership on HRM practices. This paper contributes to the literature on human resource management and organizational behavior, particularly concerning investigations that deal with antecedents of HRM practices.