A Path Study Of Improving Employees' Subjective Wellbeing From The Perspective Of Employment Relationship

There is a growing body of literature on the employment relationship in the last two decades,in a large part due to the huge changes in employee-organization relationships observed in,for example,the United States and China.To reflect and understand these changes and connections,Tsui and her colleagues(1995,1997)proposed an employee-organization relationship approach based on the employers'expectation of contributions desired from the employees and inducements the employer actually offers.Based on this EOR framework,a large number of studies have focused exclusively on a variety of economic outcomes important to the employer.However,from both a theoretical and a managerial perspective,a successful employment system should meet the needs or expectations of both the employer and the employee.Therefore,exploring the influence of employment relationship approaches on humanistic or compassion outcomes important to the employee is extremely important from both a theoretical and a managerial perspective.Drawing on the job demands-resources theory and combining goal-setting theory,social capital theory with boundary theory,the paper proposed a model of improving employees' subjective wellbeing in organizations.The paper argued that three different paths of improving employee subjective wellbeing in organizations include increasing employees' performance-based compensation,promoting employees'career development,and decreasing employees' work-family conflict.Specifically,the paper tested the effect of employment relationship approaches on employee subjective wellbeing,examined the different mediating roles of employees' job performance,career prospects perception,and work-family conflict between employment relationship approaches and employee subjective wellbeing respectively,and further explored the moderating roles of pay-for-performance perceptions,job control,and job demands on the above three mediating paths.Using a sample of 1274 employees and 273 department managers from 273 departments and 134 HR managers in 134 companies,we collected multi-level and multi-source data of different enterprises located in Jiangsu,Anhui,Guangdong,Sichuan,Chongqing and Tianjin of China from December 2014 to August 2015.The paper found:(1)inducements offered by employers to employees(job resources)positively related to employee overall life satisfaction and positive affect and negatively related to employee negative affect,while contributions expected by employers from employees(job demands)had no significant effect on employee subjective wellbeing;offered inducements and expected contributions jointly predicted employee overall life satisfaction and negative affect at work;employee overall life satisfaction was highest and negative affect was lowest in mutual investment employee-organization relationship approach.(2)Expected contributions positively related to employee job performance,which,in return,positively related to employee overall life satisfaction and positive affect and negatively related to employee negative affect;employee job performance didn't mediated the relationship between employment relationship approaches and employee subjective wellbeing.(3)Offered inducements positively related to employee perceived career prospects,and offered inducements and expected contributions jointly predicted employee perceived career prospects;employee perceived career prospects mediated the relationship between employment relationship approaches and employee subjective wellbeing.(4)Offered inducements negatively related to employee work-family conflict,and offered inducements and expected contributions jointly and negatively predicted employee work-family conflict;employee work-family conflict negatively related to employee overall life satisfaction and positive affect and positively related to employee negative affect;employee work-family conflict mediated the relationship between employment relationship approaches and employee subjective wellbeing.The thesis contributed to the employment relationship,employee subjective wellbeing,work-family conflict,career prospects literature and job demands-resources theory.In addition,the thesis made several practical contributions by providing references for building a harmonious society with social wellbeing,promoting a sustainable enterprise with employee wellbeing,and achieving individual subjective wellbeing at work.Undoubtedly,the thesis had its limitations including collecting data,methodology,and theoretical foundation.Finally,exploring new humanistic or compassion outcomes or outcomes important to the employee,using new theoretical perspectives to explain and predict the relationship between employment relationship approaches and new outcomes,and finding new practices to improve employee psychological or subjective wellbeing are encouraged in the future.