Next, a moderated regression analysis was executed in Mplus to determine the
independent and joint effects of the line manager’s enactment of HR practices, the line
manager’s relations-oriented leadership behaviour and the HR department’s service quality on
employees’ affective commitment. The independent variables were mean-centered before
calculating the product terms that represent the interactions (Aiken & West, 1991). We took
into account the nested structure of our data (employees of multiple teams within three 20
organizations were questioned) and controlled for the non-independence of our observations
to obtain accurate parameter estimates and standard errors (Stapleton, 2002)