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The purpose of this paper is to examine the underlying exchange mechanisms between ethical leadership behavior and affective commitment. The authors hypothesized that ethical leadership behavior enhances perceived organizational support (POS), which then raises employee affective commitment. The authors further predicted that economic exchange weakens such indirect effect of ethical leadership on affective commitment via POS.

Using a two-phase survey, the authors tested the hypotheses with a sample of 176 bank employees in Macau using hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping.

POS was found to mediate the relationship between ethical leadership behavior and affective commitment, whereas economic exchange was found to moderate the ethical leadership behavior – POS relationship as well as its indirect effect on affective commitment via POS.

By identifying POS as the mediator and economic exchange as the moderator, this study enhances our knowledge of the dynamics of multiple exchange mechanisms linking ethical leadership behavior to affective commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which leader behaviors (authentic, directive, and transactional) predict subordinates' conceptualization of exchanges with their organization (i.e. social and economic exchanges).

Data were collected from 165 employees in various organizations within the USA using questionnaires.

Results showed that authentic leadership was positively related to social exchanges. Further, directive leadership was positively related to economic exchanges. Contrary to the authors' prediction that transactional leadership would be a positive predictor of economic exchanges, transactional leader behaviors predicted both social exchanges (positive relationship) and economic exchanges (negative relationship). Several of the relationships between leader behaviors and follower exchange relationships were mediated by employee attitudes (i.e. job satisfaction) and beliefs (i.e. exchange ideology).

Further research is necessary to elucidate the reasons why leader transactional behaviors drive social exchanges, and through what mechanisms.

Organizations and practitioners can use these finding to select leaders who foster desired employee behaviors. Coaching or training efforts to develop authentic leaders may also be beneficial. Organizations and practitioners may benefit by implementing leadership training initiatives that develop managers' authentic leadership.

The paper's results position authentic and directive leader behaviors as positive and negative predictors of social and economic exchanges, respectively. It also identifies mechanisms through which leader behaviors influence employees' perceptions of exchanges.

This study aims to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying hospitality employees’ social exchange relationships at work by applying the social aspects of work and the social exchange theory.

MTurk was used for conducting a cross-sectional questionnaire survey, targeting frontline employees who were working in full-service restaurants. Descriptive statistic, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were performed.

Customer-employee exchange had a positive relationship with gratitude. Moreover, gratitude was positively associated with both role-prescribed customer service and extra-role customer service. Leader-member exchange and coworker exchange were positively related to obligation. Obligation had positive association with both role-prescribed customer service and extra-role customer service. The mediating effects of gratitude and obligation were statistically significant.

Employees’ social exchange relationship with customers promotes prosocial behaviors by arousing gratitude in them. Moreover, their social exchange relationships with supervisors and coworkers lead to prosocial behaviors by provoking obligation from them.

This research shows the importance of the social aspects of work to contribute to employees’ prosocial behavior in the hospitality industry. Moreover, it proves the critical roles of emotions to guide employees’ decisions about social exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of task-efficacy and information exchange in linking the relationship between developmental feedback and employee creativity. In addition, this current paper tests the moderating role of innovative climate in reinforcing the effects of task-efficacy and information exchange on employee creativity.

This current research used a time-lagged questionnaire survey to reduce the potential problem of common method variance. The sample size of this study was 305 employees from information technology companies in southern Vietnam. This research undertook a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results found that task-efficacy and information exchange fully meditated the relationship between developmental feedback and employee creativity. Furthermore, innovative climate positively moderated the effects of task-efficacy and information exchange on employees’ creative performance.

This current paper is one of the first studies to examine task-efficacy as a motivational mechanism and information exchange as a cognitive mechanism for understanding the relationship between developmental feedback and employee creativity. This paper is also one of the first attempts to investigate whether innovative climate reinforces the effects of task-efficacy and information exchange on employee creativity.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how social exchanges modify the relationship between psychological contract breach and work performance. It aims to present two concurrent hypotheses, based on theoretical interaction effects of social exchanges (conceptualized as social exchange relationships, POS, and trust).

Data were collected from a sample of 266 employees in a service sector company in the USA. Regression analysis was used to explore the moderating effects of social exchanges on the relationships between psychological contract breach and work performance (operationalized as in‐role behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors).

It was found that the negative relationship between psychological contract breach and work performance was moderated by social exchanges, such that the relationship was stronger for employees with high social exchange relationship, perceived organizational support, and trust.

The data were collected cross‐sectionally, and thus causal inferences have to be made with caution. Moreover, the data were collected from a single source. The study shows that the relations between contract breach and outcomes are moderated by the existing relationship between employee and organization.

Although organizations may invest in long‐term relationships with their employees, psychological contract breaches have a profound impact on work performance. Therefore, organizations should diminish perceptions of contract breach; for instance by providing realistic expectations.

The paper provides new theoretical insights on how social exchange can have two distinct effects on the breach‐outcomes relations. It shows that social exchanges moderate the relations between contract breach and work performance.

Although social exchange theory has long been used to explain employees’ positive work attitudes in response to perceived investment in employee development (PIED), few studies have examined this theoretical mechanism by introducing a direct measure of social exchange between employees and their personified organization. Furthermore, most studies have focused solely on one type of exchange (i.e. social exchange) and have ignored another type of exchange characterized as economic exchange. The purpose of this paper is therefore to uncover the process by which PIED affects employees’ attitudes, including affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction, by examining the mediating roles of both social and economic exchanges.

To test the hypothesized mediating model, this study conducted a three-phase, time-lagged questionnaire survey and collected data from 545 full-time employees. The model was tested based on structural equation modeling with a bootstrap test of indirect effects.

In line with social exchange theory, the findings showed that social exchange perceptions positively mediated the relationships between PIED and affective commitment/job satisfaction, whereas economic exchange perceptions negatively mediated them. Additionally, social and economic exchange perceptions were found to partially mediate the relationship between PIED and affective commitment but fully mediate the relationship between PIED and job satisfaction.

These results suggest that employers would benefit from investing in employee development, provided workers see the training investment as the employer’s side of social exchange, which in turn leads to increased affective commitment and job satisfaction. When employers do not achieve the expected returns from the training investment, they should check not only hard data (e.g. training attendance rate, hours of training, etc.) but also soft data (e.g. employees’ perceptions of training investment, social exchange, etc.) by conducting employee surveys and communicating with line managers.

The main contribution of this study is that it provides important empirical support for social exchange theory in the context of organizational training investment and employees’ attitudinal outcomes, by directly testing the positive mediating role of social exchange and the negative role of economic exchange.

While technological advances have been changing the way that services are delivered to customers, direct interaction between banks’ front-line staff and customers still holds its distinct position in the banking sector. This research investigates the relationship between interactional justice and the willingness of commercial banks’ front-line staff to engage in customer-centric behaviors, as well as the mediators behind this relationship.

This research combined both qualitative and quantitative research methods. In-depth interviews were employed to explore the potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between interactional justice and customer-centric behavior and to develop the specific measurement scale for customer-centric behavior in the banking service context. A survey was conducted to test the conceptual model using a sample of 312 customer contact employees working in Vietnamese commercial banks.

The research results indicate that interactional justice significantly enhances employees’ willingness to engage in customer-centric behaviors, and this relationship is partially mediated by overall job satisfaction and the leader-member exchange relationship.

This research faces several limitations. The first limitation concerns the fact that the data are based on self-reports, which might lead to common method biases. Second, this study used a sample drawn from the North of Vietnam only. Third, this study adopted a limited set of measurement items due to the concerns of model parsimony and data collection efficiency. Fourth, we followed prior justice work to assume the linear relationship between interactional justice and leader-member exchange, in which the leader-member exchange is hypothesized to be the outcome of fair treatment (Erdogan and Liden, 2006; Masterson et al., 2000). Last, we only considered how leaders treat their followers through the lens of interactional justice, while interactional justice differentiation has also been affirmed as a crucial determinant of leader-member exchange and employees’ performance.

This research is noteworthy that it is the first to take a social exchange perspective to examine customer-oriented behavior as an outcome of interpersonal interactions in the workplace. Accordingly, it delivers a key message to bank supervisors: “Treat employees the way you want your customers to be treated.”

–The purpose of this paper is to investigate the inter-relationships among the closely related exchange-based constructs such as psychological contract (PC) breach, perceived organisational support (POS), and exchange ideology. The authors examine the effects of three-way interaction of them on employee performance.

This study theoretically builds on a personality trait-based interactionist model of performance (Tett and Burnett, 2003) and empirically tests the model using multi-source data collected from employee-manager dyads in a non-profit organisation. Hierarchical linear modelling was employed for analysis.

The results indicate a significant three-way interaction, such that, the negative relationship between PC breach and task performance is the strongest when employees with a high exchange ideology perceive low levels of POS.

These findings suggest that organisations should ensure employees feel supported and pay special attention to employees with a high exchange ideology to minimise the harmful consequences of PC breach

The study provides new theoretical insights to PC literature by integrating the interactionist approach, cognitive psychology, and exchange ideology research. It highlights the importance of simultaneously examining both a situational and an individual variable in predicting employee performance after PC breach

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between exchange ideology and employee creativity based on the social exchange perspective. It also attempts to examine the mediating role of perceived shared leadership and the moderating role of vertical moral leadership.

Multilevel and multisource data were collected from 56 research and development (R&D) teams with 306 employees. Hypotheses were tested with multilevel path analysis.

The authors found that exchange ideology was negatively related to both perceived shared leadership and employee creativity, and perceived shared leadership mediated the relationship between exchange ideology and employee creativity. Moreover, we revealed that vertical moral leadership buffered the negative relationship between employee exchange ideology and perceived shared leadership and also the indirect effect of exchange ideology on employee creativity via perceived shared leadership.

Organizations should select employees with a relatively weak exchange ideology when forming teams to conduct creative tasks. Moreover, team leaders should make great efforts to facilitate the development of shared leadership among team members while to be a moral leader.

This study extends creativity literature by investigating the effect of exchange ideology on employee creativity. It also sheds lights on leadership research by examining the mediating role of perceived shared leadership and the moderating role of vertical moral leadership.

This study aims to examine the effects of internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the two types of communicative behaviors of employees, namely, scouting and advocative behaviors. Guided by social exchange theory, the study also explored the mediating role of social exchange relationships between an organization and its employees and employee engagement.

An online survey was conducted with 405 full-time employees in the USA across industry sectors.

Results show the following: internal CSR practices, including employment stability, working environment, skill development, workforce diversity and work–life balance, improve social exchange relationships and employee engagement; social exchange relationship mediates the positive association between internal CSR and engagement and advocative behavior; and employee engagement also mediates the association between internal CSR and the scouting and advocative behaviors of employees.

This study is among the first attempts to explore the effectiveness of organizations’ internal corporate social responsibility practices on employees’ informal communicative behaviors, information seeking and transmitting within and outside of their organization.