Organizational control mechanisms and employee outcomes: Processes and configuration

This dissertation investigates the effects of organizational control mechanisms (including executive leadership, organizational culture and employment relationships) on employee work outcomes through social and economic exchanges. The purpose of this dissertation has three folds. First, a universal perspective was adopted to explore the impacts of organizational control mechanisms on employee work attitudes (affective commitment) and behaviors (task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB)). The relative importance of the control mechanisms in predicting employee outcomes was also tested. Second, exchange theories were used to identify the mediating roles of social and economic exchanges. Third, through a configurational perspective, the alignments of three control mechanisms (organizational control systems) and corresponding employee outcomes were examined.; Two studies were conducted: the scale validation study and the main study. In the scale validation study, 1128 MBA students participated in a survey to validate the key independent and dependent variables for the main study. In the main study, a dataset collected from 31 companies (including 141 top managers and 441 middle managers) was analyzed using the hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) technique.; The results show that from a universal perspective, directive organizational culture, mutual investment employment relationship and transformational leadership style (compared with transactional leadership) can predict middle managers' attitudes and behaviors. In terms of mediation roles of social and economic exchanges, social exchange is found to mediate the relationship between directive organizational culture, mutual investment employment relationship and transformational leadership style and middle managers' affective commitment and task performance. Economic exchange mediates the relationship between non-directive culture and middle managers' affective commitment, task performance and OCB. Economic exchange also mediates the relationship between quasi-spot contract employment relationship and middle managers' affective commitment and task performance. Comparative analyses show that directive organizational culture has the highest predictive power for middle managers' affective commitment and task performance among the three organizational control mechanisms. Transformational leadership has higher predictive power for middle managers' OCB than the other two control mechanisms. Furthermore, from a configurational perspective, a strong organizational system positively relates to the work outcomes of middle managers.