The Role of Relationships at Work and Happiness: A Moderated Moderated Mediation Study of New Zealand Managers

Abstract

Interpersonal relationships at work are important especially for the well-being of employees. The present study tests Positive Relational Management (PRM) and its influence on employee happiness, and we include two firm-level moderators and an individual-level mediator to better understand the potential complexity of effects. Importantly, we test this in the context of New Zealand, which has been under-represented in employee studies of happiness and is important due to a growing national interest in wellbeing. We test whether positive relationships at work shape greater meaningful work (MFW) and this then influences happiness and mediates the effects of PRM. We also include Human Capital (the quality of people inside the firm) and firm size as moderators and combine these all to test a moderated moderated mediation model in PROCESS. We test this on a sample of 302 New Zealand managers with time-separated data. We confirm the dimensionality and reliability of the PRM scale and find it is positively related to MFW and happiness, while MFW fully mediates the direct effect of PRM. We find interaction effects including a moderated moderated mediation effect, with the indirect effect of PRM differing depending on firm size and the strength of human capital. The implications for understanding the importance of relationships on employee happiness is discussed.

Organizational identification as a trigger for personal well‐being: Associations with happiness and stress through job outcomes

“…That is, whereas stressful organizational context—that diminishes workers' job satisfaction and increases their turnover intentions—are likely to negatively influence an individual's well‐being even over and beyond the organizational context, creating a tension that is experienced not only at work but at home as well (House & Rizzo, 1972), we expect the opposite pattern to emerge when the work context is positively experienced. Thus, in line with the literature described, we anticipated a mediation model in which organizational identification is related to the personal being, and this relation is mediated by two classical work outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intention (see Figure 1 for the conceptual model; Knight & Aslam, Knight & Haslam, 2010; Haar, Schmitz, Di Fabio, & Daellenbach, 2019).…”

Does Positive Relational Management Benefit Managers Higher Up the Hierarchy? A Moderated Mediation Study of New Zealand Managers

“…The PROCESS output files provided data points for moderation to aid graphing effects, while the index of moderated mediation provided indirect effects (and confidence intervals) at low, average, and high levels of the moderator (−2SD, Mean, +2SD). See [67] for an example.…”

Kebahagiaan dalam kalangan Pensyarah di Malaysia

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