To answer your question, yes, as @Turophile pointed out, you will get a 0 or 1 in response as you can tell from the method signature (which returns an int).
In response to @Turophile comment (sorry I can't add a comment :/ ), to avoid this and avoid partial data being saved to the database, use Springs Transaction Management (tx). This would allow you to rollback transactions based on specific exceptions or all exceptions from the Exception class. Mind you, by default, @Rollback rolls back transactions for runtime, unchecked exceptions only.
@Transactional(rollbackFor = Exception.class)
public Employee updateEmployee(Employee pEmployee) { ... }
The @Transactional can also be added to the class as well, but I would read up more on it if you are interested in implementing this feature. There is a lot of good documentation on tx.
As a side note, I don't recommend lying to the caller of your method. If you call a method that says "update", run a query that'll update the record, if you want to insert/create a new record, create or call a method that "inserts" a new record into your table -- inserting a duplicate record wouldn't work anyways if the primary key(s) are unique.