Abstract :
Employee performance remains a critical concern for organizations, yet existing research often examines staffing, HRM practices, and organizational culture in isolation. This study was undertaken to address this gap by developing and testing an integrated framework that explains how staffing influences employee performance through the mediating roles of HRM practices and organizational culture, while considering employee tenure as a moderating factor. The study argues that staffing serves as a foundational mechanism whose effects are realized through organizational and cultural processes rather than solely through formal HR systems. A quantitative, cross-sectional research design was employed using primary survey data collected from employees. Structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was applied to test direct, mediating, and moderating relationships among staffing, HRM practices, organizational culture, tenure, and employee performance. Reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity (HTMT), and bootstrapping procedures were used to ensure robustness. The results reveal that staffing has a strong and significant direct effect on employee performance (? = 0.634, p < 0.001). Organizational culture significantly mediates this relationship (? = 0.206, p = 0.001), whereas HRM practices show a non-significant direct effect on performance. Employee tenure exhibits a positive but weak direct effect and does not significantly moderate the staffing–performance relationship. The model explains 52.2% of the variance in employee performance. This study contributes by empirically demonstrating that organizational culture, rather than HRM practices, is the primary transmission mechanism through which staffing translates into performance. The findings offer valuable insights for theory refinement and guide managers toward a staffing-first, culture-driven performance strategy.