Generation Mechanism Of Millennials' Self-efficacy Organizational Identification,and Responsibility

As Millennials are becoming the major force in workplace, the management of millennial employees is attracting most attention. Millennials are always presenting some unique characteristics, which are even more prominent in workplace, such as sensitivity and fragility of millennial employees in Chinese context. Frequent turnover and suicide are among the examples. So questions about Millennials are inevitable for whether management practices or academics.Confidence is one of the most confusing problem of Millennials. They are usually described as self-centered and arrogant. They are considered to always value and trust themselves. While the truth is different in practical workplace. Millennials are eager to success and excellent job outcome, but they are often confused by wrong self-positioning and conduct withdrawal behavior, such as resignation and suicide, at frustration, and show depression and dissatisfaction, all of which are sign of lacking confidence. So the problem of millennials' self-efficacy should be focused. Another serious problem for millennials is organizational identification. Individualism make them sometimes over-emphasize their personal views. And diversification of values make work and related economic return not their only pursuit, so it is difficult for them to make an agreement on objectives with the organization. Then millennials' organizational identification decline.Another important criticism on millennials is the lack of responsibility. A large part of managers and older employees argue that millennials are lacking, or even missing their responsibility. Actually, compared to the work attitude of older generations, millennials also mark themselves with self-worth, autonomy, flextime, vacation, etc. Work is just a part, not the whole of life for them. They need not to work to survive, so they refuse to work overtime or shoulder extra responsibility.In the workplace, self-efficacy, organizational identification and responsibility can be connected. The stronger and more confident individuals are more possible to take responsibility. And their strength is also a motivation, which is from either social culture or organizational structure. And if an employee keep recognizing the goal of the organization and the job task assigned, they are obviously more willing to overcome difficulties and finish their task. All these above are based on individuals' work attitude. The foundation of responsibility will be missing if employees do not value the work itself, and otherwise they could positive job outcome and feedback, which increase their confidence and responsibility. The most comprehensive description and summary for one's work attitude is work values.Work values is the intrinsic value system utilized by people to evaluate jobs, including their perception of job content and their evaluation of the meaningfulness of jobs, as well as their expectation of themselves in the workplace. Work values always play the basic role in whether job or job selection, so it is one of the most effective description of the people in workplace, which can outline comprehensively and in depth, especially for the intrinsic factors and personal characteristics. So work values have potential impact on millennials' self-efficacy and responsibility. But so far the research on the possible mechanism of this impact has been absent.Millennials are usually individualistic and self-centered. While their leader are often from older generation, who bear completely different values and believe in different management. Older generations usually value hard working and loyalty to the organization, so they are willing to conduct many Tayloristic and other traditional management, which are not fit to millennials who bear different values. Millennials take equality and fairness as priority and desire more voice in workplace, which are not satisfied in traditional management. This mismatching probably lead to damage to millennials'confidence and work attitude. So the challenge to authoritarian leadership in Chinese context, especially its impact on millennials' confidence, organizational identification and responsibility, is another focus of this research.Another possible factor affect millennials'responsibility is resilience. According to Luthans's (2010) theory of psychological capital, resilience is the key factor defining individual's reaction to frustration, which is critical to the performance of Millennials. Frustration is inevitable for everyone, so millennials'lack on resilience and preparation on setback solution may be the reason why they are not that responsible. Even for the most confident individual, difficulties and frustration must be faced, so resilience is the potential factor of importance for workplace.To solve these problems proposed, this dissertation investigated the status quo of research on millennials'work values, self-efficacy, organizational identification, responsibility, organizational justice, organization-based self-esteem, etc., and make comparison between millennials and older generation to describe the uniqueness of millennial employees. We focus on the basic function of work values in workplace and investigate their impact on millennials'self-efficacy, organizational identification and responsibility, incorporating authoritarian leadership and psychological resilience into the framework utilized to analyze the interaction of millennial work values and organizational environment and its impact on organizational justice, the possible mediating factor in producing self-efficacy and organizational identification. Longitudinal and dyadic design are adopted in structured questionnaire survey of this research to gather multi-sourced data. Data analysis methods, such as factor analysis, ANOVA, t test, and hierarchical regression, are utilized to test our hypotheses.The results showed that, the structure of millennial work values is stable, and the measure is fitted, while partial modification is necessary for some of inner dimensions. Millennials are unique because they are significantly different from older generation in multiple aspects, such as work values, self-efficacy, organizational identification, responsibility, organizational justice, organization-based self-esteem, perception of leadership, and resilience, which could be defined as generation gap rather than age one. Millennial work values negatively interact with authoritarian leadership and affect their self-efficacy and organizational identification, through the mediation of organizational justice. By the mediation of organization-based self-esteem, self-efficacy and organizational identification affect responsibility, which is positively moderated, through the mediation of psychological resilience by work values.The theoretical implication of this research include:a) promoting the contextualization of millennials related theory. Testifying the structure of millennial work values and make necessary modification; making comparison between millennials and older generation; describing the uniqueness of millennials; b) expanding the theory of work values by integrating it with millennials. Investigating the impact of work values on self-efficacy, organizational identification, and responsibility. Testifying the explanatory power of self-verification theory; c) revealing the inner mechanism of work values'impact on self-efficacy and organizational identification, extending the related theory. Testing the interaction of work values and authoritarian leadership, its impact on self-efficacy and organizational identification, the mediating role of organizational justice, and the moderation of resilience in generation of responsibility; d) promoting the standardization of research on organizational behavior. Utilizing comprehensive model and test, including moderated mediation, mediated moderation, bootstrap, etc., to increase the robustness and reliability of research results.The practical implications of this research are as follows:a) personalized management should be adopted to maximize the strength of different cohorts, because there are significant differences between generations; b) work values is the basis of almost all the work outcomes, so organization should select individual with positive work values, and pay attention to reshaping work values for existing employees; c) organization should adopt innovative management, showing respect to millennials and keeping communication, in order to promote their confidence and organizational identification; d) Helping employees build resilience, especially the psychological preparation and solutions, by training and coaching, so that millennials could successfully finish their job task.