Human Resource Management © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI:10.1002/hrm.21771 Correspondence to: Songbo Liu, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China 100872, Ph: +86-10-62513013, Fax: +86-10-62513427, E-mail: songbo.liu@163.com. rationale of the performance effect of HR practices is that organizations can achieve strategic objec- tives by using HR practices to direct employee behaviors (e.g., Jiang, Lepak, Hu, & Baer, 2012; Messersmith, Patel, Lepak, & Gould-Williams, 2011; Takeuchi, Lepak, Wang, & Takeuchi, 2007). From a managerial perspective, strategic HRM research is valuable for understanding the extent to which HR practices can influence organiza- tional performance. For example, a meta-analysis UNDERSTANDING EMPLOYEES’ PERCEPTIONS OF HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES: EFFECTS OF DEMOGRAPHIC DISSIMILARITY TO MANAGERS AND COWORKERS KAIFENG JIANG, JIA HU, SONGBO LIU, AND DAVID P. LEPAK Strategic HRM researchers have increasingly adopted an employee perspective to understand the influence of HR practices on employee outcomes and have called for studies to explain variability in employees’ perceptions of HR prac- tices. To address this research need, we used the social information processing perspective to examine the contextual influence of managers and coworkers on employees’ perceptions of HR practices and explore demographic dissimilarities as boundary conditions of the contextual influence. Conducting research in two organizational settings, we found that both manager-perceived and coworker- perceived HR practices were positively related to employees’ perceptions of HR practices. The results also revealed that employee demographic dissimilarity to coworkers in terms of age and organizational tenure weakened the positive relationship between coworker-perceived and employee-perceived HR practices. However, the relationship between manager-perceived and employee-perceived HR practices was not influenced by demographic dissimilarities. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Keywords: perceptions of HR practices, demographic dissimilarity O ver the past three decades, numerous strategic human resource management (HRM) studies have substantiated the benefits of investing in human resource (HR) practices. Researchers have dem- onstrated that HR practices intended to improve employee competence, motivation, and opportu- nity to perform are positively related to organi- zational performance (e.g., Delery & Doty, 1996; Guthrie, 2001; Huselid, 1995). A fundamental