The Research Of The Structure Of Employees' Reciprocity Behaviour And Its Relationship With Other Factors

Over the years, the research of the relationship between employee and organization in workplace has been one of the critical issues in the fields of organizational behaviour and human resource management. Though there have been abundant achievements of theoretical and empirical research on the reciprocity relation of employee and organization, which based on social exchange theory and the norms of reciprocity, there has been little research on employee and organization reciprocity behaviour directly. Employee's reciprocity behaviour is defined as an act of returning to organization, which an employee take according to what and how much the organization offer and provide to him/her in the exchange relationship between employee and organization.The purposes of this dissertation were to investigate the structure of reciprocity behaviour of Chinese employees, as well as to study the antecedents of reciprocity behaviour. For these purposes, some standard research methods, such as literature review, interview and survey were used in the research. In addition, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were also applied for data analysis. More than 1000 employees in 30 different enterprises and public institutions from 12 cities in China were surveyed. The main conclusions are as the following:First, the Chinese employees' reciprocity behaviour structure was three dimensions model which included Positive Reciprocity, Balanced Reciprocity and Negative reciprocity. The reliability and validity of reciprocity behaviour questionnaire were highly enough.Second, it was discovered that the tendency of forgiveness had active effect on Positive Reciprocity but had negative effect on Negative reciprocity; oppositely, the tendency of revenge had negative effect on Positive Reciprocity but had active effect on Negative reciprocity. The research also discovered organizational justice had different effects on all the three dimensions of reciprocity behaviour, supervisor-subordinate guanxi had different effects on Positive Reciprocity and Negative reciprocity.Third, the research found that organizational justice partially mediated the relationship between supervisor-subordinate guanxi and Positive Reciprocity, and fully mediated the relationship between supervisor-subordinate guanxi and Negative Reciprocity.Fourthly, the research discussed about the demographical variables' effects on reciprocity behaviour. The demographical variables included sex, age, service year and unites character. It found that the demographical variables had some significant effects on different dimensions of reciprocity behaviour.Current limitations and future research orientation were also discussed at the end of the dissertation.