This article investigated the effect of personal characteristics (proactive personality) and contextual characteristics (organizational learning culture and job complexity) on employees' intrinsic motivation and organizational commitment. Employees exhibited the highest organizational commitment when they perceived higher learning culture and higher job complexity. Employees were more intrinsically motivated when they showed higher proactive personality and perceived higher job complexity. The perception of their job complexity partially mediated the relationship between organizational learning culture and organizational commitment and the relationship between proactive personality and intrinsic motivation. Overall, organizational learning culture, proactive personality, and perceived job complexity accounted for 44% and 54% of the variances in organizational commitment and intrinsic motivation, respectively. In addition, proactive personality moderated the relationship between organizational learning culture and organizational commitment. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and recommendations for further research are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to identify dynamic relationships among organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and learning organization culture in a Korean private company. Using a sample of 669 employees from five subsidiaries of a Korean conglomerate, this research found that learning organization culture is moderately and positively related to job satisfaction. In addition, organizational commitment, except for continuance commitment, was found to be moderately and positively related to learning organization culture and job satisfaction. This research enables CEOs and HR practitioners to view organizational commitment, learning organization culture, and job satisfaction as important variables that can be applied in their management, interventions, and practices.

Purpose – Employee well-being has been an under-researched area in the field of human resources (HR) and organizational behavior. The purpose of this paper is to investigate personal (learning goal orientation (LGO)), contextual (empowering leadership), and job-related (psychological empowerment) antecedents of psychological well-being (PWB). Design/methodology/approach – Individual perceptions of knowledge workers in nine Korean consulting firms in South Korea were obtained using a cross-sectional survey. HR managers distributed paper versions of a survey questionnaire to 400 employees, and 334 usable questionnaires were collected, giving the authors a final response rate of 83.5 percent. Findings – As a result of structural equation modeling analysis, the level of employees’ psychological empowerment turned out to partially mediate the relationship between LGO and PWB, while fully mediating the relationship between empowering leadership and PWB. LGO and perceived empowering leadership accounted for 54 percent of the variance in psychological empowerment and the three antecedents explained 47 percent of the variance in PWB. Research limitations/implications – This study relied on a cross-sectional survey method with potential common method bias. As a result of the single-factor test, however, it is unlikely to confound the interpretations of the results. Another limitation of this study is that the sample of this study was restricted to knowledge workers with relatively high cognitive ability since they were mostly junior male managers with four-year college or graduate degrees. Practical implications – To enhance perceived empowerment and PWB, HR, and OD practitioners can support employees and their managers by providing relevant HR practices and services including developing supportive empowering leaders with effective coaching skills, hiring, and developing employees with higher LGO, and redesigning jobs for employees so they feel more empowered. Originality/value – This study linked four emerging subjects in management and positive psychology: goal orientation, empowering leadership, psychological empowerment, and well-being research. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in that it is one of the first attempts to investigate the relationships among LGO, psychological empowerment, and PWB specifically for knowledge workers in South Korea.

This article examines the impact of transformational leadership and psychological empowerment on career satisfaction in a Korean conglomerate. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that employees showed higher career satisfaction when they perceived high meaning, competency, self-determination, and impact from their work (i.e., psychological empowerment) and when they perceived idealized influence from their leaders (i.e., one dimension of transformational leadership). Among the demographic variables, educational level and the length of the leader–member relationship turned out to be significant. The results of the structural equation modeling analyses showed that psychological empowerment fully mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and career satisfaction. Finally, implications, limitations, and research recommendations are discussed.

In existing generational research, millennials are generally described to have a low level of job involvement. However, there is still little agreement on how to classify generations, which can be regarded as an artificial concept. Therefore, describing a specific generation with a fixed characteristic increases the possibility of committing overgeneralization errors. Because significant individual differences can exist between employees classified as belonging to the same generation, this study investigated whether individual differences actually appear in millennials' job involvement. It was found that individual differences do exist to an extent similar to other variables, so whether individual-level factors can explain the variation was examined. Differences in millennials' job involvement could be significantly explained by LMXSC and person-job fit but not core self-evaluation. Finally, theoretical and practical implications of the findings and suggestions for subsequent studies are proposed.