Leadership Styles, High-Involvement Human Resource Management Practices, and Individual Employee Performance in Small and Medium Enterprises in the Digital Era

This research investigates the positive relationship between leadership styles, high-involvement human resource management practices, and individual employee performance. In this study, we adopt servant, shared, and empowering leadership to explain leadership styles in the digital era. We propose four hypotheses and design a research framework to be analyzed. We develop a self-report questionnaire and distribute it online to three hundred targeted respondents, and collect two hundred and seventy-six complete responses from November 2021 to January 2022. This research applies a quantitative method, using structural equation modeling run by SPSS and AMOS. The results reveal well-distributed data, and all the indicators of the three variables are valid and reliable. The use of CFA confirms the indicators’ validity and reliability. The GoF analysis ensures that the research model is feasible for SMEs. The hypothesis analysis shows the acceptance of H1 and H3, but the rejection of H2 and H4. Leadership styles positively affect individual employee performance and high-involvement human resource management practices in SMEs operating in Lubuklinggau. High-involvement human resource management is not a mediator of the relationship between leadership styles and individual employee performance.