Is the employee–organization relationship dying or thriving? A temporal meta-analysis.

Abstract

There is controversy concerning whether, in recent years, organizational failures to act benevolently toward employees have lessened employees' social-exchange relationship (SER) with their work organization or whether, on the contrary, organizations' more favorable treatment of employees has strengthened the SER. With samples of U.S. employees, we examined changes over the past 3 decades in three key elements of the SER: perceived organizational support (POS: 317 samples, including 121,469 individuals), leader-member exchange (LMX: 191 samples, including 216,975 individuals), and affective organizational commitment (383 samples, including 116,766 individuals). We considered both how the average levels changed over time and how the associations of these 3 elements with the antecedents of procedural and distributive justice and the consequences of in-role and extra-role performance have changed. We found that the average levels of indicators of the SER have remained steady except for an increase in POS. LMX and affective commitment show levels near neutral, and POS has increased to only a moderately positive level. In contrast, the relationships between these elements with distributive and procedural justice and extra-role performance remain substantial. These findings suggest that employees on average do not currently have strong exchange relationships with their work organization but remain ready to more fully engage based on perceived voluntary favorable treatment by the work organization and its representatives.

Analysis of the Influence of Entrepreneur’s Psychological Capital on Employee’s Innovation Behavior Under Leader-Member Exchange Relationship

“…The evaluation of innovation behavior of employees with a master's degree or above was significantly higher than that with a bachelor's degree or less (p < 0.05). This was completely contrary to the conclusion of Eisenberger et al (2019) that employees with bachelor's degrees had higher innovation ability than those with master's degree. The reason for the analysis may be that the enterprises selected in this study were mainly in the Internet industry, and the employees with master's degree or above undertook more sophisticated tasks and had higher innovation.…”

Leader–Member Exchange Fosters Beneficial and Prevents Detrimental Workplace Behavior: Organizational Identification as the Linking Pin

“…Third, we theoretically postulated and empirically demonstrated the effect of LMX regarding OI but did not control for a SET construct referring to the organization, such as perceived organizational support (POS; e.g., Rhoades and Eisenberger, 2002;Eisenberger and Stinglhamber, 2011;Eisenberger et al, 2019). Specifically, Lavelle et al (2007) argued that employees hold distinct social exchange relationships with multiple organizational foci (e.g., organization, supervisors) and suggested that employees rather reciprocate treatment they experienced within foci than to generalize to others.…”

“…This exchange of resources is governed by the norm of reciprocity in that one party tends to repay the other party in accordance to the value of the exchange ( Gouldner, 1960 ). As such, an employee may choose to reciprocate perceived treatment by the supervisor with respective positive or negative behavior (e.g., Colquitt et al, 2013 ; Eisenberger et al, 2019 ; Greco et al, 2019 ). Within organizations, people develop differentiated social exchange relationships, most prominently with their direct supervisor (e.g., Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995 ; Liden and Maslyn, 1998 ; Cropanzano et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Supervisors are considered to be organizational agents (e.g., Kelman, 1958 ; Rousseau, 1995 ; Ostroff, 2019 ) who enact organizational rules and norms—from an employee’s perspective, supervisors are furthermore understood as proxies for the organization (e.g., Rousseau, 1995 ; Eisenberger et al, 2010 , 2019 ). Therefore, employees might attribute—and thereby generalize—the status of their relationship with their immediate supervisor to the entire organization (e.g., Gerstner and Day, 1997 ; Martin et al, 2016 ; Dulebohn et al, 2017 ).…”

“…We draw from the social identity approach (e.g., Tajfel and Turner, 1986 ; Turner et al, 1987 ; Haslam, 2004 ) to argue that the extent to which employees identify with their organization [organizational identification (OI)] accounts for the effects of LMX on discretionary workplace behavior, such as CWB and OCB. Employees tend to generalize the relationship quality with their supervisor to the organization (e.g., Gerstner and Day, 1997 ; Zhang and Chen, 2013 ; Eisenberger et al, 2019 ), that is, the better the relationship with their supervisors, the more connected employees feel with their employer. Consequently, they should be more inclined to define themselves in terms of the organization (e.g., Carmeli et al, 2011 ; Loi et al, 2014 ; Zhao et al, 2019 ) and, in turn, act in the organization’s best interest by refraining from CWB and engaging in OCB (e.g., Riketta, 2005 ; Riketta and Van Dick, 2005 ; Lee et al, 2015 ).…”