A Study On Structure, Antecedents And Outcome Of Work Alienation In China

Work alienation has been the focus of Sociologist's and Psychologist's attention in the last decades. This study includes three parts. The first part, we explored the construction of work alienation of Chinese staff as a hypothesized model using Explore Factor Analysis (EFA), then examined the construct validity using CFA. The second part, we constructed the influence model among "job characteristics", "work alienation" and "affective commitment". The third part, we analyzed the difference of work alienation in all demography variables. All analyses were based on data from organizations of Guangdong province, Shandong province and BBS.Main conclusions of this study are as following.(1) The construction of work alienation of China staff consists of five factors—self-estrangement, social isolation, meaningless, powerlessness, and normlessness. Goodness of fit statistics indicate good fit to the observed data.(2) Goodness of fit statistics of the influence model indicate good fit to the observed data. Results show that, the perception to job characteristics has a strong negative predictive effect on work alienation, whereas a strong positive predictive effect on affective commitment.(3) Results show that self-estrangement is significantly diffident on age and martial statuses, the staff of different job level, organization category and gender shows significant differences on powerlessness. The staff of different educational level shows significant differences on normlessness. The staff of different organization category shows significant differences both on social isolation and meaningless. The staff of different job category shows no significant differences on all factors.