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The literature on job crafting has paid scant attention to the role of skill variety, one dimension of job characteristics, as a predictor of employee job crafting. By integrating regulatory focus and social exchange perspectives with job crafting literature, the authors investigate how skill variety promotes employee job crafting and the moderating roles of employee's promotion focus and procedural justice climate.

The authors conducted two questionnaire surveys, one with a sample of 205 employees from a variety of organizations in China, and the other one with a sample of 265 employees within 44 work groups at a state-owned enterprise in China, to examine the hypotheses.

Results suggest that a high level of skill variety within a job promotes employee job crafting, that such an effect is stronger when the employee's promotion focus is high rather than low, and that procedural justice climate mitigates the negative influence of a low level of promotion focus.

The authors' findings suggest that both self-regulatory and social exchange mechanisms play a critical role in promoting employee job crafting when individuals are engaged in jobs that entail a high level of skill variety.

– While researchers have discussed the association between career change to self-employment and job satisfaction, few have considered how the association is achieved. Therefore, in this study, the authors aim to explain this relationship from the perspective of job quality. The authors build on job design theory to propose and empirically test how fluctuations in job satisfaction as associated with the transition to self-employment can be explained by changes in job quality.

– The authors tested their propositions using a longitudinal, nationally representative database from Australia for the 2005–2019 period. The final sample included 108,384 observations from 18,755 employees.

– In line with the literature, the authors found that job incumbents experienced low job satisfaction in the years prior to their career change to self-employment and that their job satisfaction improved after the transition. More importantly, the authors found the same change pattern for job quality – measured as job autonomy and skill variety – and the statistical results demonstrated that job quality was the key determinant of job satisfaction during the process.

– This study advocates the importance of job quality in managing employee wellbeing and facilitating retention.

– The authors contribute to the literature by uncovering how job quality, represented by skill variety and job autonomy, can explain fluctuations in job satisfaction during individuals’ career change from paid employment to self-employment.

The development of information technologies has fueled the emergence of online self-organizing teams that involve members with diverse backgrounds to work on a shared goal voluntarily. However, the differences in members' attributes give rise to diversity. Therefore, the authors’ research is to figure out how diversity affects team performance in the context of online self-organizing teams and how this effect changes over team tenure.

The authors use a dynamic approach to the diversity-team performance relationship and collect a publicly longitudinal dataset on 3,970 collaborative items from 2,550 online self-organizing teams spanning nine years in an open innovation community of an online game.

The empirical results show that culture separation is negatively related to team performance, and this negative relationship weakens as team tenure increases. While skill variety and contribution disparity are positively related to team performance, and these positive relationships strengthen as team tenure increases.

The study provides a research framework to examine the relationship between diversity and team performance and explore how this relationship varies over team tenure in the context of online self-organizing teams. The results not only demonstrate the double-edged role of diversity in affecting the success of online self-organizing teams but also advance the understanding on the temporal effect of diversity on team performance.

Previous studies on job characteristics have been performed mainly in Western contexts. More empirical evidence is needed to understand the important job characteristics of positive job outcomes in a non‐Western context. Therefore, this research has two objectives: to assess the impact of five job characteristics on work attitudes and behaviors in the UAE, and to test the mediating impact of distributive justice on the job characteristics‐work outcomes relationship.

The study reports responses of 350 employees from five large organizations operating in Dubai. Data were collected on a structured questionnaire containing standards scales of job characteristics, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intentions, distributive justice, and some demographic variables. After testing scales reliability and validity, the proposed linear relationships were tested using a series of separate hierarchical regression analyses. Proposed mediation hypotheses were tested using Baron and Kenny's recommendations.

Consistent with studies conducted in a Western context, the study showed that skill variety and feedback have functional impacts on job satisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intentions. Contrary to Western studies, the study reported that task identity and task significance have functional effects on work attitudes and behaviors. Autonomy also showed unexpected positive relationship with turnover intentions. Additionally, distributive justice mediates some of the relationships between job characteristics and work outcomes.

The limitations of common method bias and cross‐sectional data are discussed in the light of implications for future research. Nevertheless, the results provide new insights on the influence of job characteristics on work outcomes in a non‐Western context of the UAE. Also, the study reported evidence for the mediating impact of distributive justice on the job characteristics‐work outcomes relationship.

The study has implications for enhancing work behaviors and attitudes. In general, enhancing certain job characteristics can result in higher‐level employee outcomes. Also, managers should improve some of the contextual factor (i.e. distributive justice) in order to enhance the impact of job characteristics on work outcomes.

The study is considered to be one of the first to examine the job characteristics‐work outcomes relationship in a non‐western context of the UAE. Also, it is among the first studies to test the role of distributive justice as a mediator for the job characteristics‐work outcome relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between employee perspectives of high-performance work systems and employee outcomes, i.e. job satisfaction and affective commitment, and to propose ways of increasing the positive effects of high-performance work systems on firm performance.

The data were collected from 370 employees in the Chinese manufacturing industry during 2010. The Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) method was used to test each of the eight hypotheses deriving from the conceptual framework.

The paper finds that: employee perspectives of high-performance work systems have a positive effect on both job satisfaction and affective commitment; and breadth of behavioural script and level of autonomy mediate the relationship between employee perspectives of high-performance work systems and their attitudes towards that organisation (job satisfaction and affective commitment); however, skill variety did not mediate the relationship between employee perspectives of high-performance work systems and employees’ attitudes in the data set used.

The findings of the paper suggest that managers can improve employees’ attitudes by integrating effective high-performance work systems in their working environment. Even more interestingly, it appears that by encouraging broad behavioural scripts or allowing employees more freedom to apply their skills, managers can improve employees’ attitudes more significantly than by encouraging employees to acquire a variety of skills.

Using signalling and psychological-contract theory, the paper shows the dominant influence of employees’ perceived high-performance work systems on employees’ attitudes via behavioural scripts and autonomy.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between job characteristics (JC) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) moderated by job satisfaction (JS) among educators in the higher education institutions in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman, taking into consideration that most educators at the higher education institutions in this area are expatriates.

A sample of 157 faculty members and instructors was used. Five job characteristics (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback) and five OCB behaviors (altruism, civic virtue, courtesy, conscientiousness, and sportsmanship) were studied. The overall job satisfaction was measured with seven general items adopted from Al-Damour and Awamleh (2002). Data were collected voluntarily using social media network announcements and pencil and paper. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was used in testing this moderation relationship.

Results showed that job satisfaction plays a significant moderating effect in enhancing the relationship between four out of the five job characteristics (feedback, skill variety, task identity and autonomy) and only two out of five OCB behaviors, namely, altruism and courtesy. Also, culture showed no significant impact on results.

Using a self-reporting tool, the respondents could give biased responses that might influence results. In addition, the use a complex relationship to establish a causality relationship among many variables measured with many items did make it difficult and sometimes errored out using SEM analysis.

This study delivers important suggestions to the management of these institutions as well as higher education administration about how to enhance their educators’ OCBs as a source of competitive advantage taking into consideration that expatriates work within certain legal and social contexts.

With very limited related research covering this region, this study provides an insight into how educators’ OCBs can be enhanced within unique employment structures and policies designed for expatriate educators in the GCC countries.

Knowledge withholding is an important but under-studied topic, which refers to the phenomenon that individuals give less than full effort to contributing knowledge. This study aims to investigate the differential effects of task characteristics on individuals’ knowledge withholding behavior in online space, this study develops and empirically verifies a theoretical model that covers the five core task characteristics in job characteristics model (autonomy, identity, feedback, skill variety and significance), knowledge sharing self-inefficacy and withholding effort in sharing knowledge.

Using an online survey method, this study collected empirical data from 351 general internet users from 30 provincial administrative units in China. The data were analyzed using the structural equation modeling technique of partial least squares.

The analysis results indicate that autonomy negatively affects, while identity, skill variety and significance positively affect users’ knowledge withholding behavior in online space through the mediation of knowledge sharing self-inefficacy, and that three task characteristics (autonomy, identity and feedback) strengthen the relationship between knowledge sharing self-inefficacy and knowledge withholding.

This study provides valuable insights for reducing knowledge withholding behavior in online space. Operationally, different levels of task characteristics such as autonomy, identity and feedback can be set to prevent users from perceiving themselves as inefficacious, and to weaken the behavioral expression of knowledge sharing self-inefficacy.

This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the differential effects of task characteristics on knowledge withholding in online space, and improves the cognition of the boundaries of withholding effort in sharing knowledge in online space.

How to design jobs to support innovation is an issue that has received plenty of consideration over the past years. Building on the job characteristics model, the present study is set up to identify configurations of perceived job characteristics for innovation.

By adopting a fuzzy-set configurational approach (fsQCA), the research question is addressed through a two-wave self-report survey of 199 employees of an Italian manufacturing company.

Results reveal four compatible configurations of job characteristics leading to high levels of innovative work behavior and two for low levels.

The results offer guidance for managers and organizations that aim to strengthen employee-driven innovation by offering different recipes of job design to maximize the chance of boosting innovative behaviors among their workers.

This research is one of the first to empirically test the relation of job characteristics for innovative behavior using a configurational approach. By doing so it contributes to the literature by advancing the notion that innovative endeavors are determined by the holistic effects of different interdependent configurations of job characteristics.

Potential appraisal is the foremost indicator of employee's readiness to take higher responsibilities and used for multiple purposes in promotion, human resource development including training and development needs of employees. This study examines how construal level as psychological difference among employees (holistic–analytic differential in preference of thinking for various action domains among individuals) and meaningfulness of work is related to their readiness for development and responsibility. Combining meaning of work literature and cognitive psychology, the moderated mediation model is formed to examine the psychological process and social boundary conditions in the relationship between construal level and potential appraisal of employees.

Data were collected from 1,494 working executives and their 297 reporting managers across companies operating in an industrial cluster situated in India. The proposed model considered “experienced meaningfulness” as mediator and contextual factors of psychological empowerment and supervisor feedback as moderators.

Using multi-variate analysis and after controlling for industry type and experience, supervisor potential appraisal ratings of employees are found to be statistically related to construal level, and this relationship is found to be partially mediated by “experienced meaningfulness” of work. Further, contextual factors are found to be significant as moderators.

By bringing the subjective interpretation of different aspects of meaning of work from work design literature to examine its role in relationship between aspects of cognitive psychology and potential appraisal of employees, this study bridges the gap between cognitive psychology of development, meaning of work literature and HRD literature. Further implications for academic literature and managers are discussed.

Examines met expectations of retail trainees within a job context framework that consists of five job characteristics. The job characteristics of autonomy, skill variety, task significance, task identity, and feedback from others have been linked to job outcomes such as job satisfaction. Results indicated that for each job characteristic, expectations were higher initially than actually experienced one year later. Three of the five characteristics (feedback, autonomy, and skill variety) were important in predicting job satisfaction. Demographic variables of gender and work experience yielded significant differences of met expectations for two job characteristics.