Study On The Relationship Of Employees’ Workplace Friendship, Affective Commitment And Voice Behavior

In today’s more and more competitive environment, companies want to pursue sustainable development and be apart from the competition, it requires constant innovation to adapt to changing external environment. The source of innovation is from the wisdom of the people, so how to explore the talent in the organization, so that they can be free to put forward suggestions and new ideas about the organization has become a common topic in human resource management practitioners and academic researchers. Making recommendations often means change, and the challenges to the existing system or superiors. So in a real organization, even it has realized the importance of the voice behavior, but not all employees are willing to produce this kind of behavior. Especially in the Chinese context, the influence of the traditional concept of the golden mean, etc., a lot of people may be more willing to complacent, and the phenomenon of leadership "mouthpiece" also often exists. Why do some employees have the courage to express their views? What factors affect different employees in the same organizational environment to produce varying degrees of voice behavior? Western scholars began to study employee voice behavior since the1970s, especially its antecedents. The existing research related to employee voice behavior can cause the antecedent variable consists of two main areas. One area is about the demographic characteristics of employees (Janssen, de Vris&Cozijnsen,1998); Individual personality and cognitive style(LePine&Van Dyne,2001); Employee satisfaction and organizational justice perception (Withey&Cooper,1989).The other area is about the relationship between managers and employees (Rui Li, Wenquan Ling&Shishun Liu,2009); Organizational climate and type, etc.But individual level and organizational level factors seem not enough to fully explain voice behavior in the organizations. Employees working in the organization are not an independent entity engaged in the work, they always communicate with their colleagues. Thus, interpersonal factors, which have impact on voice behavior, have become a topic of concern in this study.In this study, after carding overview of existing literature, the author introduces of the concept of "workplace friendship" to explore whether workplace friendship has a significant positive effect on employees’voice behavior or not. In order to understand the mechanisms of workplace friendship and employees’voice behavior, this study introduces the concept of "organizational affective commitment", to explore the mediating effect of organizational affective commitment between workplace friendship and voice behavior.In addition, this study suggests there are significant differences between traditional Chinese culture and Western culture. China’s state-owned enterprises have their own characteristics, so this study selected employees in state-owned enterprises in China as empirical research object.In the present study, the author applied SPSS20.0software, do a detailed statistical analysis of the questionnaire results of272valid samples, including Independent samples T-test, one-way ANOVA, correlation and regression analysis. The author has the following conclusions:1. Workplace friendships not only have a direct significant positive impact on employees’voice behavior, it also has indirect positive effects on employee voice behavior through the organizational affective commitment. Organizational affective commitment played a mediating role in the middle of the workplace friendship and employees’voice behavior. This study of the theoretical model was established.2. Staff position in the demographic variables has a significant positive impact on employees’voice behavior, the higher of the position of the staff, the more obvious of voice behavior.The significance of this study:In the area of theoretical significance, the study integrates the emotional commitment, employees’voice behavior and workplace friendship in the framework of the same theory, and enriches the influencing factors of employees’voice behavior; Trying to fill the theoretical study blank of this three variables; Standing on the perspective of the employees, in the environment of China’s state-owned enterprises to validate the effectiveness of the Workplace friendships theory in the Chinese context. In the area of practical significance, the conclusions of this study will help companies focus on training good friendship relations between the staff, especially the staff working together in the same team in order to promote its positive effects on voice behavior. Guiding the organization to focus on the development and training of staff emotional commitment, thus further contributing to the generation of employees’ voice behavior.Finally, according to the research findings, the study puts forward some management recommendations:Strengthen the organization within the upper and lower levels of communication, break through Level shackles, and to establish reasonable suggestions incentives; Promote workplace friendship, and strengthen the building of enterprise culture, to enhance the emotional commitment of the employees in the organization to promote employees’voice behavior.