员工政治自我效能对组织公民行为的影响研究:心理资本的调节作用

The Impact of Employees' Political Self-efficacy on Organizational Citizenship Behavior:The Moderating Effect of Psychological Capital

本研究以来自5家公司的272对主管与员工之间的配对数据为样本,探讨了员工政治自我效能与组织公民行为间的关系以及心理资本的调节作用。研究结果表明:政治自我效能与组织公民行为之间呈现倒U型的关系,当员工政治自我效能较低和较高时,组织公民行为都比较低,而当他们的政治自我效能处于中等水平时,组织公民行为最高;心理资本对组织公民行为具有积极的促进作用,同时能够减弱员工政治自我效能对组织公民行为的倒U型影响。

Political self-efficacy has been constructed based on social cognitive theory to describe the beliefs that employees can, by means of their own political traits, achieve personal goals in political environment. Employees＇ perceptive comparison of their own politi- cal traits and the political environment that indicates the general level of organizational politics can be regarded as the major source of political self- efficacy. The more confidence employees have in their competency, the higher their political self- efficacy will be. Or- ganizational citizenship behavior （ OCB）, one of the facilitators of organizational effectiveness, describes the out - role behaviors that are not clearly defined in formal organizational rules and regulations but are recognized by organizational reward systems. This study was designed to figure out the relationship between political self - efficacy and OCB, and the moderating effect of psychological capital on this relationship. Hypotheses were proposed based on the perspectives of social cognitive theory and positive organizational behavior. The mechanism of the relationship between political self - efficacy and OCB was tested based on 272 paired data collected from employees and their di- rect supervisors. Political self - efficacy was measured by the cumulative percentage differences of both the perceptions of their own po- litical traits and organizational politics. The perception of political traits was measured by 16 items adopted from Machiavellianism scale developed by Dahling, Whitaker and Levy （2009）, and the perception of organizational politics was measured by 9 items adjusted from Vigoda （2001）. Psychological capital was measured by 24 items adopted from Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio （2006）. OCB was meas- ured by OCBI adopted from Williams and Anderson （ 1991 ） with 6 items in each scale. In order to avoid the common method variance problem in this study, two structured questionnaires, an employee questionnaire and a direct supervisor questionnaire, were employed as the measuring instruments. In the employee questionnaire, perception of political traits, perception of organizational politics and psycho- logical capital were included; and then OCB was evaluated. The OCBI was included in the direct supervisor questionnaire. Results indicate that political self - efficacy has a reversed U shape impact on OCB ; that both high and low levels of political self - efficacy are associated with low OCB ; and that the moderate level of political self - efficacy leads to the highest OCB. This finding not only extends and fills the organizational politics literatures, but also reveals practical implications for managers that they should help em- ployees to maintain a moderate level of political self- efficacy to promote organizational effectiveness. Results also show that in addition to the positive effect on OCB, psychological capital serves as a conditional variable and moderates the reversed U shape relationship be- tween political self - efficacy and OCB such that higher psychological capital weakens the tendency of the reversed U shape impact of po- litical self - efficacy on OCB, which means that psychological capital acts as a substitute of political self - efficacy. In application, this finding suggests that managers should take psychological capital intervention as the moderating means to reduce the negative impact tend- ency of high self- efficacy on OCB. Moreover, theoretical contributions and shortcomings of this study are also discussed.