Employee-organization Relationship, Employees’ Work Outcomes

In recent years, influenced by "institutions" and "market", expectation of employee-organzation relationship from employees and employers has changes greatly. A new way is urgently needed throngth which employee-organzation relationship influence employees’ work outcomes. By review of related literatures, it can be found that the following gaps: since the existing researches in literatures ignore conflicts between needs of organziations and that of employees, more researches should be carried out in perspectives of balance of the two parties; in researches on relationship between employee-organization relationship and work outcomes, the effect of mechanism based on employees’ organization membership such as organization commitment gradually decreases in trends that flexible employment, frequent talent flow and boundaryless career become more and more significant; the previous researches have not yet given a good solution on conflict between employees’ increasing needs of career development and limited space of career growth within the organization. Therefore, this paper focuses on main research question: "in the context of change expectation of both employees and organization, how employee-organization relationship influences employees’ work outcomes".In order to solve the problem, this paper used job satisfaction as the outcome representing employees’ interest and job performance as the outcome representing organization’s interest, and proposed career commitment as the key to balance the interest of the organization and employees. This paper established a framwork that employee-organization relationship influences employee’ work outcomes(job satisfacation and performance) by sequential mediation of organizational-based self-esteem(OBSE) and career commitment.To test the framework, this paper conducted two studies by survey. Study one used self-determine theory and tested a model that career commitment mediated relationship between employee-organization relationship and work outcomes. Study one collected data from 396 employees to justify the hypotheses. Study two focused on employee-organization relationship in organization level. Study two tested a cross level model that employee-organization relationship influences employee’ job satisfacation and performance by sequential mediation of OBSE and career commitment with nested data which include 142 positions, 625 supervisors and 3182 employees. Results were concluded from the two studies as follows:First, in all types of employee-organization relationship(EOR), mutual investment EOR fostered highest employee’ job satisfacation and performance, while qusi-spot contract EOR fostered the lowest. In overinvestment and underinvestment EOR, job satisfacation and performance were in the middle.Second, employees’ perceived offered inducements and expected contributions by employees enhance each other, and influenced job satisfacation and performance through mediation of career commitment. In other words, mutual investment EOR which high/board offered inducements and high/board expected contributions achieve best synergistic effect, and hence throngh mediation effect of career commitment fostered highest job satisfacation and performance. In overinvestment and underinvestment EOR, throngh mediation effect of career commitment, job satisfacation and performance were median. In qusi-spot contract, mediation effect was the lowest.Third, throngh sequential mediation of OBSE and career commitment, offered inducements(organization level) influenced job satisfacation and performance. Expected contributions moderated the mediation effect in the first stage.This paper may contributes to the following domain. First, this paper extends mediation effect of career commitment in the relationship between EOR and work outcomes(job satisfacation and performance). Second, this paper extends mediation effect of OBSE and career commitment. Finnally, this paper combines self-determination theory and self-regulation theory to explain how EOR influences work outcomes, which extends the research perspectives of EOR reseach. The implication of the studies lies in that career commitment is effective alternative mechanism balancing needs of organization and employees when effect of organization commitment decreases. And in the process, organizations may increase employees’ OBSE to enhence employees’ career commitment.