模范员工与反生产行为——自我控制的视角

Exemplary employees and counterproductive work behavior——A study from the self-control perspective

模范员工一定会做出有利于组织的行为吗?实际上,出于印象管理动机的模范员工极有可能做出反生产行为,其中自我控制资源发挥着关键作用。本文以自我控制资源理论为基础,采用工作日志的调研方法,收集了121个员工的数据,包括121份个体之间数据和1210份个体内部的数据,探讨印象管理中员工的模范策略对反生产行为的影响及自我监控的调节作用。研究结果表明:模范策略通过自我控制资源损耗的中介作用对反生产行为产生正向影响;自我监控在模范策略促进自我控制资源损耗的过程中具有调节作用,在高自我监控的情况下,模范策略对反生产行为的正向影响减弱,在低自我监控的情况下,模范策略对反生产行为的正向影响增强。

Will the exemplary employees′behaviors always benefit to their organizations?In fact,exemplary employees who are motivated by impression management are likely to behave counterproductive work behavior where self-control resources play a key role.Impression management refers to behaviors that employees use to create and maintain desired images in the workplace.Manager-targeted exemplification(MTE)is one of the impression management strategies.Prior studies have studied the different outcomes between employees.The use of impression management usually relates to higher performance evaluation and many other positive outcomes for employees′career.But these works have ignored how does the employees′impression management influences their behaviors to the organization.Based on the literature review and self-control resource theory,we conclude that the use of MTE strategy requires employees′self-control ability.Even though self-control ability comes from self-control resources,after consumption,employees′self-control resources are depleted,and employees will lack self-control ability in subsequent behaviors,which makes them easy to do counterproductive work behavior.Self-monitoring can moderate the process.The self-monitoring individual is one who,out of a concern for social appropriateness,is particularly sensitive to the expression and self-presentation of others in social situations and uses these cues as guidelines for monitoring his own self-presentation.According to the above literature review,we propose the following hypotheses:Manager-targeted exemplification strategy has a positive impact on the state self-control resources depletion(H1);Manager-targeted exemplification strategy has a positive impact on counterproductive work behavior mediated by state self-control resources depletion(H2);Manager-targeted exemplification strategy on counterproductive work behavior via state self-control depletion will be moderated by self-monitoring,such that the relationship is stronger when employee self-monitoring is low(H3).In research design,we used the work log method to collect data.The questionnaire consists of two parts.The first part was filled by the participants before the first working day,in order to collect data at between-person level(self-monitoring).The second part included a working log of 10 working days which is filled in by the respondents after the end of each day′s work.The participants were required to describe their behavior and mental state of the day,in order to collect variables at within-person level:MTE,self-control resource depletion,counterproductive work behavior,and control variables(weather and workdays).Our researchers issued a total of 145 questionnaires to bank staff,recycling 128 sets,excluding 26 points missing more serious questionnaires,access to 102 points effective questionnaires.That is 102 effective data between individuals and 1020 effective data within individuals.In the data analysis section,we used SPSS,HLM and R software to analyze the data and show our test results.We conducted a variance partition analysis by running null models in HLM for each within-person variable to examine whether there is a meaningful variation for our within-person perspective.Within-person accounted for 50.78%of the variation in manager-targeted exemplification and consequently there is significant within-person variation in employees′MTE.The results of SPSS and HLM show that MTE strategy has a positive relationship with counterproductive work behavior.And MTE strategy(r=0.08,p<0.05)has a positive impact on self-control resource depletion.Self-control resource depletion has a positive impact on counterproductive work behavior(r=0.11,p<0.05).Therefore,MTE strategy has a positive effect on the counterproductive work behavior mediated by self-control resource depletion.In the examination of the moderator,the results show that the MTE and self-monitoring interactions has a positive effect on self-control resource depletion(r=0.26,p<0.05).Thus,self-monitoring plays a moderator role in the process of MTE promoting self-control resource depletion.In the case of high self-monitoring,the positive effect of MTE on the counterproductive work behavior is enhanced.While in the case of low self-monitoring,the indirect effect of MTE on the counterproductive work behavior is weakened.To test the moderated mediation effects in an integrated fashion,we tested the indirect effects at one standard deviation.When employee self-monitoring was high,the indirect effect of MTE on counterproductive work behavior via self-control resource depletion was significant(indirect effect=0.029,95%CI=[0.008,0.097]),but this indirect effect became not significant when employee self-monitoring was low(indirect effect=-0.011,95%CI=[-0.069,0.004]).The difference between these two indirect effects was significant(difference=0.040,95%CI=[0.009,0.159]).The innovative contributions of this study are presented in the following areas.First,this study examines one impression management strategy that is widely used in the organization,but has been rarely studied(MTE).In the past,researches focused on the positive impact of impression management on the career of employees.This study proves that manager-targeted exemplification depletes the self-control resources of the employees so that the employees′self-control ability will be impaired,which increase employees′counterproductive work behavior.This study broke through the traditional perspective,studied the impression management of the employees at the organizational level,and revealed the negative impact of the impression management behavior on the organization.Through the study,we can explain why good employees sometimes do something detrimental to the organization.This study has management implications:this research can remind employees that when adopting manager-targeted exemplification,it should be realized that this behavior will lead to the lack of self-control ability in subsequent behaviors,thus making some disadvantages to the organization making the previous efforts on the impression management in vain.The organization should create a free organizational atmosphere for employees and reduce the motivation for employees to carry out impression management,so that decrease the self-control resource depletion caused by manager-targeted exemplification,through which enables employees to maintain sufficient self-control resources to cope with business and various tasks and to reduce the counterproductive work behavior,so that the relationship between the members of the organization is more harmonious and the organization work more efficiently.In the last section,we discuss the limitations of this study.The variables in this study were all from the employee′s self-assessment,lacking data from other evaluation.If the study designs multi-source data,the influence of homologous variance would be avoided,the data test results could be more reliable.Another limitation is the limited selection of control variables.