Perceived social support versus social embeddedness: Effects of employee and organizational outcomes

Research examining perceived social support and social networks in relation to employee attitude and behavior was conducted using two samples in a cross-sectional design. One sample included full-time technical employees at a bank, the other sample included part-time MBA students who worked full-time For both samples, data were obtained from the employee and the manager; for the bank sample, company records regarding employee performance rating were obtained.;Previous research on perceived social support examined its relationship with stress and job satisfaction, primarily. Little research examined other work related outcomes, such as the employee's commitment to the organization, career satisfaction, job satisfaction, performance, and citizenship behaviors. Although research on social networks has examined network effects on career satisfaction and employment opportunities, there has been little research on the other outcomes.;Based on leadership and mentoring concepts and theories of social exchange and social information processing, this study examined the employee's perceived affective support, career informational support, and instrumental support and the employee's self-reported networks for social, career advice, job advice, and production purposes and their relationships with these work related outcomes. Factor analysis was used to obtain the three factors of perceived support. The hypotheses were tested using regression analyses and F-tests.;The results from the bank sample were slightly different from the results from the MBA sample. Overall, though, the results support research that identifies the supervisor as having significant influence on employee attitudes and behaviors. This study also identifies some situations where higher-ups, coworkers, and non-work relationships also influence employee attitudes and behaviors. The results also indicated that the employee's perception of social support was more predictive of the work related outcomes than the employee's networks of relationships. Thus, the number of people in a person's social network and whether or not these people know each other may be less critical to a person's work attitudes and behaviors than the quality or strength of the support the person perceives as received.