Building Communal Relationship Between Employees And Team:the Effect Of Authentic Leadership And Communal Orientation

Researches focused on the employee-organization relationship were almost based on the social exchange theory,which emphaise the idea of reciprocity where a benefit is given with the expectation of receiving a comparable benefit in return or for the benefits received before.However,employees in exchange relationship often care much about private interests and lack the intrinsic motivation to fight for organizational goals.Additionally,exchange relationship lacks emotional links,so it is easily broken when the balance of interests is destroyed.Therefore,in the fiercely competitive market environment,those small companies that can't provide a substantial return will find it difficult to attract and retain talent through exchanges.Difference from exchange relationship,the communal relationship bases on emotional links.People in the relationship feel responsibility to meet partners' needs.The communal relationship between employees and organization shows that employees work hard voluntarily for the organization's goals,are willing to make personal sacrifices for collective interests and tolerate short-term unfair treatment.Our study hopes to supplement the employment relationship theories through the study of the communal relationship in the work teams,and also to provide ideas for solving some realistic problems in the exchange relationship.Our study explored the influences of the individual-level variable(communal orientation)and team-level variables(authentic leadership,team authenticity)on employees' communal strength to the work team,as well as examined the process through which these influences are realized.To understand the mechanism behind communal relationship formation,we draw upon two previously distinct theories,self-expansion theory and social identity theory,introduced team identification as the mediator and established a cross-level theoretical model.In the Study 1,we collected data from 243 employees in 63 work teams.The results of HLM 6.8 multilayer linear model analysis showed that:(1)the authentic leadership significantly predicted team authenticity and team identification;team authenticity partly mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and team identification;(2)Authentic leadership and team authenticity had positive indirect impact on the communal relationship between employees and the team through the full mediation of team identification.The data of Study 2 came from 276 employees in 4 companies.Through the regression analysis of spss23.0,the results revealed the following:(1)In the work teams,employees' communal orientation was positively related to communal strength to the team;(2)employees' communal orientation was positively related to team identification;(3)team identification partially mediated the relationship between employees' communal orientation and communal strength to the team.