Amid recent chaos and uncertainties, organizations need to design and implement novel human resource management (HRM) practices to build a thriving workforce that is healthy, growing, and energized, meeting the needs for human sustainability. This study mobilized the socially embedded model of thriving (SEMT) to investigate how specific well-being-oriented HRM (WBHRM) practices improve job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through the sequential mediating impacts of work needs satisfaction and thriving at work, moderated by HRM system strength. Based on three-wave and multisource data collected from 316 employee-manager responses in China’s manufacturing industry, we identified the chain-mediating roles played by needs satisfaction and thriving at work in the relationships between WBHRM and job satisfaction and OCB. Furthermore, we revealed that HRM system strength, as a core organizational climate, moderates the indirect influence of WBHRM on thriving at work, which advances our understanding of SEMT’s central premise of the critical role of environments in fostering thriving. We also theorize the psychological mechanisms that link WBHRM, thriving, job satisfaction, and OCB.
