互惠对工作要求——工作满意度曲线关系的调节作用

本文运用中国文化背景下开发的互惠量表,通过对西安某合资制药企业210名员工的调查,考察了企业对员工三种类型的互惠行为对工作要求—工作满意度的倒U型关系的调节作用。调查结果表明,广义互惠、平衡互惠越高,二者的倒U型关系越明显,负互惠越高,二者的倒U型关系越不明显。

Reciprocity as a Moderator in the Curvilinear Relation-ship between Job Demands and Job Satisfaction

To better understand employee management in organiza-tions,it is important to pay attention to how employees respond to the demands of their job.Activation theory indicates that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between job demands and job satisfac-tion.As a consequence,there has been increasing interest in identify-ing different moderators that influence this curvilinear relationship.Previous studies have shed light on examining whether job-contextual conditions may moderate the curvilinear linkage between job demands and job satisfaction.However,organizational scholars have pointed out that more attention should be paid to employee-organization exchange relationships if we hope to explain organization phenomena.Unfortu-nately,few studies to date have explored whether aspects of employee-organization exchange relationships,such as reciprocity,moderate the curvilinear relationship between job demands and job satisfaction.Rec-iprocity is a behavioral response to perceived kindness and unkindness,where kindness comprises of distributional fairness,as well as fairness intentions suggested by equity theory.Reciprocity has been character-ized by the dimensions of generalized reciprocity,balanced reciprocity and negative reciprocity.That is,givers with generalized reciprocity are altruistic and do not expect recipients to respond in kind,givers with negative reciprocity are characterized by high self-interest,and giv-ers with balanced reciprocity require reimbursement with something of the equal value.Since it is viewed as a multidimensional construct,reciprocity should have a different influence on job satisfaction when combined with job demands.Based on a scale developed against the background of Chinese culture and a sample of 210 employees from a joint pharmaceutical enterprise in Xi'an,this article explores how perceptions of the three kinds of reciprocity behavior moderate the inverted U-shaped job demand-job satisfaction relationship.Survey results demonstrate that the U-shaped relationship between job demand and job satisfaction is increasingly manifested as generalized reciproc-ity and balanced reciprocity increases,and is decreasingly manifested as negative reciprocity increases.