The influence of common good human resource management on employee retention in the United States from motivational and personality perspectives

Abstract

Retaining employees remains a persistent challenge for organizations, and conventional human resource management frameworks typically address it through economic exchange, leaving open the question of how HR systems oriented toward the common good relate to employees' internal motivation and their intention to stay. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory and Trait Activation Theory, this study examines the relationship between Common Good Human Resource Management (CGHRM) and job retention, positioning work intrinsic motivation and prosocial motivation as mediating mechanisms and agreeableness as a moderating trait. Survey data were collected from 300 full-time employees in the United States recruited via the Prolific platform and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4, with hypothesis testing based on bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples. The results show that CGHRM is positively associated with job retention, work intrinsic motivation, and prosocial motivation. Work intrinsic motivation mediates the relationship between CGHRM and job retention, whereas prosocial motivation does not. Contrary to the hypothesized direction, agreeableness negatively moderates the relationship between CGHRM and prosocial motivation: the association is stronger among employees lower in agreeableness, while no moderating effect emerges for job retention. These findings are consistent with the proposition that CGHRM supports retention primarily through work intrinsic motivation, and suggest that common-good practices may serve as a situational substitute for dispositional prosociality, thereby extending Trait Activation Theory. For practice, organizations seeking to retain employees can design HR systems in which contributions to the common good foster employees' work intrinsic motivation, without depending solely on selecting naturally agreeable employees.