Do managers and employees see eye to eye? A dyadic perspective on high-performance work practices and their impact on performance

• This study examines how HR perceptions are shaped in manager-employee relationships. • We adopt a dyadic perspective to explore the impact of HR-perception misalignment on outcomes. • Employees demonstrate greater commitment and performance when their perceptions of HPWPs align at high levels with those of their managers. • Greater agreement on no use of HPWPs reduces commitment and performance. • Unused HPWPs harms employee commitment and job performance. This study adopts a dyadic approach in strategic human resource management (HRM) to investigate (mis)alignment between line manager and employee reports of high-performance work practices (HPWPs) for individual workers and their impact on employee commitment and manager-rated employee performance. Specifically, we examine the implications of four types of (mis)alignment in HPWP reports for individual workers (i.e., formal HPWPs, no use of HPWPs, unused HPWPs, and informal HPWPs) in a diverse sample of line manager–employee dyads (N = 252). The findings demonstrate that commitment positively mediates the formal HPWPs–job performance relationship and negatively mediates the relationship between no use of HPWPs and unused HPWPs and job performance. This study contributes to strategic HRM literature by highlighting the importance of adopting a dyadic line manager–employee approach to provide a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of HPWPs offered to individual workers.