The Double-edged Sword Effect Of The Mutual Investment Employment Relationship

During the period of economic transformation,organizations is facing with increasing market competitions as well as more challenges.In fact,the relationship between employees and employers has always been the core issue of business administration.Employment relationship is a combination of offered inducements and expected contributions from the employer.In order to better manage employees,more and more employers have resorted to high investments and high expectations employment approach to maintain talents and gain advantage,namely mutual investment employment relationship.For example,Huawei,a world's leading communications technology manufacturer in china,is advocating the "three high" strategy,namely high-paying,high-pressure and high-efficiency.This mutual investment approach provides organization with more human capital and also improves employees' work initiative.However,employees and the organization's goal are not always consistent.Not only is the way to gain profit,employees also had their own emotions and interests.So the fact is that in such firms some employees facing with some psychological or physical problems,such as job burnout and even sudden death,which has caused negative impact on employees,enterprise and society.In this paper,based on a sample of Chinese enterprise employees,we explored the "double-edged sword" effect and its mechanism of mutual investment employment relationship from both positive and negative perspectives,and from both work and family domains.Such study clears the relationship between the mutual investment relationship and taking charge behavior,emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict,which not only expands and enriches the extant literature of mutual investment,makes up for the defects of previous research,but also provides some valuable practical implications to the management of employee-organization relationship and harmonious labor relations.In the first of dissertation,it summarized the literature review of mutual investment employment relationships,which were consisted of four major parts.Part one presented the definition,measurement of mutual investment,as well as the method of data processing.Part two reviewed the positive effects of mutual investment and part three reviewed the mediating and moderating mechanisms of mutual investment.Part four clarified the root and existing researches of negative effects of mutual investment approach.On the basis of this literature review,several theoretical gaps of the extant mutual investment research were discussed and the main content of this dissertation were also mentioned.Then,through three studys we further explored the positive and negative effect of and meachnism of mutual investment employment relationship on employee behavior and also the effect on work and family domains.The relationship between mutual investment and taking charge behavior were discussed as the positive aspects.As for the negative aspects,we probed the relationship between mutual investment,emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict.Specific as follows:the positive impact of mutual investment employment relationship was studied first.We studied the positive effect of mutual investment approach on taking charge and the mediating effect of psychological ownership and the moderating effect of family-like exchange relationship.Analyses of multisource date from 69 work teams and 249 team members revealed that:the relationship between mutual investment and taking charge behavior was significant through the mediating role of psychological ownership;family-like exchange relationship positively moderated the effect of mutual investment on psychological ownership,the higher family-like exchange relationship,the more positive effect of mutual investment on psychological ownership;family-like exchange relationship positively moderated the effect of mutual investment on employees' taking charge via psychological ownership,the higher family-like exchange relationship,the stronger of the indirect effect.A basic assumption of mutual investment is that employers and employees have a long-term cooperative relationship,and also have the same goal and interests.However it's not the fact.There are difference and such difference would has impact on employee's motivation.So,from the perspective of work motivation,we put forward two competing mediations:whether mutual investment employment relationship inspired employees harmonious passion which can lead to lower levels of emotional exhaustion or mutual investment increases the employee's obsessive passion that would leading to higher levels of emotional exhasution.Analyses of multisource date from 57 work teams and 213 team members revealed that:mutual investment had the positive effect on emotional exhaustion;obsessive passion mediated the relationship between mutual investment and emotional exhaustion,while harmonious passion not mediated;employees' power distance orientation moderated the effect of mutual investment on the obsessive passion,the higher the power distance orientation,the more positive effect of mutual investment on obsessive passion;employees' power distance orientation moderated the effect of mutual investment on the employees' emotional exhaustion via obsessive passion,the higher the power distance orientation,the stronger of the indirect effect.However,the influence of mutual investment on employees' attitude and behavior not only occurs in the work area,but also other activity outside the work such as family area.Accordingly,the third study expanded the research scope of mutual investment from work domain to family domain.Analyses revealed that:mutual investment had indirect effect on work-family conflict through emotional exhaustion;a climate for sharing concerns moderated the effect of emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict;the relationship is stronger for emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict with low concerning climate than for high concerning climate;the moderating effect of emotional exhaustion on work-family conflict was not significant.In the final part of the dissertation,the main findings of the dissertation were concluded,and the limitations and future directions were discussed as well.