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As knowledge management increasingly becomes critical for the success of professional service firms, this paper uses social exchange theory to investigate the interactive impact of transformational leadership and organizational innovation on online knowledge sharing by employees in professional service firms. This study aims to investigate the mediating roles of job autonomy and job engagement in this process.

Data were collected from a survey of 350 frontline employees in professional service providers, including banking, telecommunication and insurance. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

The results show that transformational leadership positively affects job autonomy, which in turn has a positive impact on online knowledge sharing through job engagement. Thus, job autonomy and job engagement mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and online knowledge sharing. Finally, organizational innovation moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and job autonomy.

This paper extends the knowledge management literature by studying the impact of transformational leadership on the online knowledge-sharing behavior and exploring the focal roles of job autonomy and job engagement in online-sharing behavior in professional service firms. The findings also provide useful implications for practitioners to help them engage employees in the adoption of digital technologies to optimize outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the relations between perceived job autonomy and attitudes are stronger among self‐employed than employees.

Four samples (total n=25,974), consisting of self‐report data from working adults, were used. In each, participants were classified under three work arrangements: owners of businesses employing others, independent contractors, and employees. The perceived job autonomy for each work arrangement was determined, as were the strengths of the relationship with attitudinal variables (job satisfaction, life satisfaction, professional commitment, and stress). Correlational analysis and hierarchical regression were used to test whether the strengths of these relationships were stronger among the self‐employed.

In all four samples, both types of self‐employed reported more job autonomy than employees. In all samples and within all work arrangements, the relationships between job autonomy were statistically significant and positive with respect to desirable outcomes and negative with respect to stress. However, the strengths of these relationships were no greater among owners or independents than among employees.

From a career advising and planning perspective, the research indicates that self‐employment, either as an owner or independent, is an effective tactic for individuals to increase their job autonomy. However, there was no evidence that the self‐employed differ from employees with respect to the benefit they receive from the job autonomy they perceive.

This study adds to the literature on career choice and self‐employment by comparing the strengths of relationships between job autonomy within and across work arrangements.

The purpose of this study seeks to examine how nonfamily employees' job autonomy and work passion can influence their job satisfaction and intention to quit in family small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Current, research regarding the determinants of nonfamily employees' job satisfaction and turnover intentions has largely focused on the effects of family influence and family firm characteristics. Accordingly, not much is known of how the job characteristics and emotions of nonfamily employees influence their job satisfaction and intention to quit.

Data were collected from 160 nonfamily employees across 28 family-SMEs. Process macro was used to analyze the mediating role of nonfamily employees' work passion in the relationship between their job autonomy and job satisfaction and intention to quit.

Findings showed that nonfamily employees' job autonomy only had a significant direct effects on their job satisfaction and not their intention to quit. Subsequently, nonfamily employees' work passion was found to only partially mediate the relationship between their job autonomy and job satisfaction.

By focusing on the concepts of job autonomy and work passion, the study adds additional insights about the drivers of nonfamily employees' pro-organizational attitudes in family-SMEs. Also the study represents one of the first efforts in the literature to establish a link between job autonomy and the work passion of nonfamily employees with respect to their job satisfaction.

In this paper, the moderating roles of leader reward omission and person–supervisor fit in the relationship between job autonomy and knowledge hiding are investigated.

Using a sample of 248 employees in a two-wave survey, we performed a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results revealed that employees with high job autonomy were less likely to engage in knowledge hiding. Moreover, when employees experienced leader reward omission, the negative relationship between job autonomy and knowledge hiding was weakened, and this interesting effect varied by person–supervisor fit.

This study does not explore the mediating mechanism by which job autonomy affects employee knowledge hiding. Moreover, as this research was conducted in a Chinese context, the generalizability of our findings is unclear.

This research has fulfilled its practical aims by providing advice on knowledge-relevant job characteristic factors that can be used to stage interventions regarding the provision of autonomy in jobs, and by carefully considering how to create interdependence between jobs without pushing people to engage in knowledge-hiding behaviors. Furthermore, it is important for leaders to help employees identify work goals and directions and not engage in reward omission.

This study contributes to theoretical advancements in the field of knowledge hiding by revealing boundary conditions that mitigate or enhance the impact of job autonomy on knowledge hiding.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) in the relationships between job autonomy and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and the moderating role of organizational strategy in those relationships.

The hypotheses were tested by a moderated mediation model using multilevel survey data that were collected in South Korea in 2008.

This study found that POS mediated the relationship between autonomy and OCB regardless of organizational strategy, and that job autonomy was more strongly related to POS in companies with an analyzer strategy than with a defender strategy. The results also indicated that the indirect relationship between job autonomy and OCB via POS was stronger in companies with an analyzer strategy than in companies with a defender strategy.

This study provides a new mechanism in the relationship between job autonomy and OCB using social exchange theory. An analyzer strategy should not be treated as a hybrid of defender and prospector strategies.

While all organizations may benefit from providing employees with job autonomy regardless of organizational strategy, companies with an analyzer strategy in particular should provide their employees with sufficient autonomy.

The present study bridged the gap between the macro and micro approaches through multilevel analyses. This study is unique in that it examined the vertical fit between job autonomy and organizational strategy while focussing on individual employee outcomes.

This study aims to explore the impact of ethical leadership on employee creative deviance, with job autonomy as a mediator and creative self-efficacy as a moderator between job autonomy and creative deviance.

A survey was developed based on construct measures from the literature. A total of 316 responses were received from employees of information and communication technology companies located in China's Pearl River Delta.

Both ethical leadership and job autonomy have a positive impact on employee creative deviance; job autonomy plays a mediating role between ethical leadership and creative deviance; creative self-efficacy does not have a significant moderating effect on the job autonomy-creative deviance relationship.

Future studies could explore the potential moderating role of both job autonomy and creative-self efficacy in the link between ethical leadership and creative deviance.

This study recommends that organizations should adopt and promote an ethical leadership approach to manage creative deviance at work. Organizations could explore alternative methods of task completion to support the job autonomy for the employees to mitigate the dilemmas associated with creative deviance.

This is one of few studies that examine the impact of ethical leadership on employee's creative deviance, despite the fact that the influence of ethical leadership on the followers has been extensively examined.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interactive effects of employee job autonomy and trust on the relationship between psychological contract fulfilment and work behaviour in international non-governmental organisations.

Data were collected from 279 employees of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) with over 10 years of working experience in the INGO industry in Ghana. A questionnaire comprising 27 items pertaining to the study constructs was administered. The reliability of the instrument was verified through item analyses. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to establish the instrument’s construct validity. The study hypotheses were tested and competing models were compared using multiple hierarchical regression.

All scales were found to have acceptable reliability estimates. A confirmatory factor analysis established that the manifest variables met the required model fit thresholds and that the latter were empirically distinct. This established the scales' construct validity. The results of the multiple hierarchical regression procedures indicated that a significant number of the study hypotheses could be accepted as statistically significant. A number of moderators were also significant. Specifically, psychological contract fulfilment (PCF) was found to have a positive relationship with organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The results also showed a positive relationship between job autonomy and in-role employee performance (IRP) and OCB. There was a positive relationship between both the IRP and OCB. Interestingly, employee job autonomy moderated the positive relationship between PCF and OCB.

This research is among the first of its kind to examine the variables of PCF, work behaviour, employee job autonomy and trust towards the organisation among INGO employees in Ghana. Additionally, the study provides a novel lens to understand the underlying interaction mechanisms through which employee job autonomy moderates the positive relationship between PCF and in-role employee performance. To the best of our knowledge, this study will be the first to combine PCF, trust, employee job autonomy, in-role employee performance and organisational citizenship behaviour in one study. This study confirms and extends the work of Turnley et al. (2003) by including trust and employee job autonomy as key constructs in a social exchange relationship, drawing from the social exchange theory.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether emotional deviance in response to customer aggression and employees’ feelings of anger is likely to be influenced by perceived job autonomy. To date, studies on emotional labor have focused primarily on emotional regulation strategies. Little is known about the factors that may serve to increase emotional deviance (i.e. situations in which felt and expressed emotions match but are at odds with organizational display rules).

Three samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel, and data were collected using self-reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses.

Study 1 revealed that under conditions of frequent exposure to customer aggression, more perceived job autonomy was associated with more frequent instances of emotional deviance. The results of Study 2 and Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between anger and emotional deviance was stronger for employees reporting high levels of perceived job autonomy.

Given the potentially negative impact of emotional deviance on customer satisfaction, organizations should find a balance between satisfying employees’ desire for control and discretion and ensuring employee compliance with display rules.

This study contributes to the existing literature by pointing out that job autonomy may have a “dark side”, in the sense that it provides employees with a certain level of perceived freedom, which might then be extended to include freedom from rule compliance, especially when negative emotions are experienced.

This study mainly aims to examine the mediating effect of perceived organizational support (POS) and the moderating effect of locus of control and job autonomy on the relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and organizational citizenship behavior.

Through a questionnaire survey of 231 employees and their direct supervisors of five hotels in Guangzhou. This paper analyzed five variables (customer mistreatment, POS, locus of control, job autonomy and organizational citizenship behavior) relationships through a variety of data analysis.

Results indicate that customer mistreatment behavior has a negative effect on employees’ organizational citizenship behavior. The relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior is partially mediated by employees’ POS. Staffs’ locus of control and job autonomy can modulate the relationship between customers’ mistreatment behavior and POS. Furthermore, the indirect mediating effect of POS on customer mistreatment behavior is revealed. The organizational citizenship behavior linkage is significant only to staff who perceived they have a high level of job autonomy and a high locus of control.

Hotels are advised to provide organizational support and the management of customer mistreatment behavior so as to reflect their employees’ value, seek service innovation and promote production efficiency in practice. Furthermore, it maintains and promotes operational efficiency for service organizations and means the organization pays more attention to meet the social, emotional and psychological needs of its employees.

This article reveals the mechanism relationship between customer mistreatment behavior and employee organizational citizenship behavior. First, it defines the concept of customer mistreatment in the hotel industry and enriches the related research. Second, the study, from the perspective of customer mistreatment, has opened up a new view of organizational citizenship behavior research. Third, we built a research model and it is helpful to grasp the inner mechanism between customer mistreatment and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior. Fourth, this research benefits service organizations so as to maintain and improve their operation efficiency. Furthermore, it can have theoretical guidance for service-oriented organizations to develop a harmonious consumption culture and organizational culture.

Individuals can improve their task performance by using information and communications technology (ICT). However, individuals who use ICT may also suffer from negative outcomes, such as burnout and anxiety, which lead to poorer performance and well-being. While researchers have studied the positive outcomes of ICT use in the aggregate, the same has not been done for negative outcomes.

This study uses a meta-analysis of 52 studies to examine the relationship between ICT use and negative outcomes, and the influence of job autonomy on ICT use and the negative outcomes of ICT use. Job autonomy is relevant because a higher level of job autonomy allows individuals to decide how, how often and when they will use ICT that is causing negative outcomes for their work.

The results of the meta-analysis revealed that ICT use increased negative job outcomes and that, unexpectedly, autonomy exacerbated this effect.

The results of this study point to the prevalence of negative outcomes from ICT use among individuals. Researchers should study how users may potentially restrict the value that organizations may be able to obtain from the implementation of new systems, especially whether individual-level negative outcomes could coalesce into a collective resistance. There also needs to be further research into the motivating and inhibiting roles of autonomy in enhancing ICT use, while mitigating its negative impacts simultaneously.

The study provides an aggregate analysis of the negative impacts of ICT use among individuals and the role of autonomy in the relationship.