| This paper uses the perspective of transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1975, 1985, 1991; Williamson, Wachter, & Harris, 1975) to examine how employee perceptions of internal labor market attributes affect their behavior. Although there is an extensive amount of theory from employer's perspective and at the organizational level of analysis, there has been little research that has attempted to examine the actual impact of the internal labor market on employee behaviors. As a result, the study described in this paper identifies employee behaviors (individualized deal-seeking behavior and organizational citizenship behavior) that are influenced by perceived internal labor market attributes based on the notion of transaction cost analysis. Specifically, perceived internal labor market attributes were hypothesized to be negatively related to the amount of individualized deal-seeking behavior, and positively related to the amount of organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, as Williamson et al. (1975) suggest, worker skill-specificity (Becker, 1964; Doeringer & Piore, 1971) was hypothesized to moderate the relationships between employees' perceptions of internal labor market attributes and both of the criterion variables. Empirical analysis from a sample of 624 white-collar workers in Korea was used to test the logic of the hypotheses, and the results generally supported the hypotheses. |
