The current study will examine the effects of employees’ perceived organizational resource decline on employee’s work dedication and organizational citizenship behavior (here after OCB). Reduction or increase of organizational resources could be an important organizational context in that resources of a same level in an organization might be interpreted differently depending on whether employees perceive the status of resources as a gain or loss. Although several public administration scholars discussed the potential impact of employees’ shared psychological loss of organizational resources in the context of cutback management (Ingraham & Barrilleaux, 1983; Kelman, 2006; Levine, 1979), an empirical examination has not been conducted yet. The present study will also examine whether employees’ job resources (i.e., work climate, supervisor’s performance feedback and goal clarity) could play significant roles to bust employees’ dedication and OCB. Previous studies have found consistently that job resources could enhance employees’ work engagement and OCB (Bakker et al., 2007; Salanova et al., 2005; Salanova & Schaufeli, 2008; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004), but few studies examined whether the relationships could be consistent even when employee perceive organizational resource decline.
To understand underlying employees’ psychological experience of organizational resource decline, the current study will adopt various theoretical implications from stress studies: effort-reward imbalance model (Siegrist, 1996), compensatory regulatory-control model (Hockey, 1997) and job demand-resource (JDR) (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, & Schaufeli, 2001). It should be noted that the current study will not focus on testing each theory. Rather, the current study focuses on explaining substantive impacts of perceived organizational resource decline on dedication and OCB based on the implication of the theories.
The current study was conducted adopting survey items from Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCV) in the United State. Multilevel data analyses were conducted to examine joint influences of perceived organizational resource decline and job resources on employees’ dedication and OCB.
In the period of fiscal austerity, public sector managers confront a fundamental dilemma: how they can motivate public employees when employees perceive that supports from their organizations have diminished and they have fewer chances to grow in the government organizations. The current study can provide managerial clues to public sector manager to sustain government employees’ engagement when employees go through the psychological loss of organizational resources.
This paper proceeds as follows. In the next section, different theories and related literature on job resources and employee motivation will be reviewed and specific hypotheses will be proposed. Following the literature review, methodology will be explained, and the paper will present findings from the data analyses. Implications and conclusion will be discussed in the last section
