A Study On The Relationship Between Perceived Organizational Support And Work-Family Enrichment In College Teachers

Work and family,as two of the most important areas in which individuals participate,their relationship has always drawn much public attention.A mass of researches on conflicts and contradictions between them have occupied the mainstream of academia till Sieber proposes role accumulation theory especially since Greenhaus and Powell formally proposed the concept of work-family enrichment and the dual path model of work-family enrichment was constructed,which worked out a new way in conducting work-family researches.However,there are many inconsistent conclusions in the existing researches.The researches on the factors that influenced the work-family enrichment and its intrinsic mechanism need to be further perfected.Therefore,based on the summary and review of previous studies,resource conservation and role accumulation theories,taking university teachers as research object,the study analyzes the relationships between perceived organizational support,job involvement,psychological capital,work-family border flexibility,family support and work-family enrichment in China with environmental stimulus-organism-response as framework.As the key players of higher education,university teachers are responsible for such important functions as personnel training,scientific research,social services,cultural transmission and innovation,and so on.Based on the attention paid to the professional characteristics and work features of university teachers,compared with other professional groups,university teachers usually possess greater work-family border flexibility and should be able to perform family responsibilities more handily due to their relatively free working hours and locations.However,in reality,university teachers especially young teachers are generally under great working pressures.Excessive work has squeezed the time of their participation in family life to a large extent and affected their family role performances.At the same time,over-commitment also causes a shattered body to a certain extent,thereby triggering anxiety,obsessive-compulsive disorder and other psychological diseases,which affects the quality of family life.Therefore,for the phenomenon that the effects of higher work-family border flexibility on the work-family relationship of university teachers observed in the reality is different from general explanation,how should we analyze and balance the work-family relationship from a positive perspective to promote the enrichment is the purpose and the main research content of this study.From the positive perspective of university teachers' work-family relationship,the study examines the teachers' individual mental state(job involvement and psychological capital),verifies their effects on work-family enrichment and its mechanism,and explores border effects as well as limiters of family support and work-family border flexibility,taking universities' organizational support perceived by teachers as a signal source of environmental stimuli.This research surveys more than 500 full-time teachers from 28 universities in Shanghai,Beijing,Jiangsu,Anhui,Sichuan,Chongqing,Guizhou,Hubei and other provinces through questionnaire,using SPSS21.0,AMOS 17.0,Mplus and other softwares to conduct a statistical analysis,which empirically examines the theoretical model and research hypotheses of this paper and draws the following main conclusions:(1)The perceived organizational support of university teachers has a positive influence on work-family enrichment.As an important external support resource,organizational support will have a positive effect on the organization and the employee's family through the employee' s psychological perception.(2)The work involvement of university teachers plays an intermediary role in the relationship between perceived organizational support and work-family enrichment.The positive work experiences brought by organizational support will spread to the family field.When individuals perceive the enrichment of work for the family,they will further form a cognitive judgement that the work is a valuable resource,which thereby transforms into work motivation,that is,the family's enrichment for work.(3)The psychological capital of university teachers plays an intermediary role in the relationship between perceived organizational support and work-family enrichment.Psychological capital is an important resource that benefits not only individual teachers and families but also university organizations.Various support measures for teachers in universities can help teachers to relieve physical and psychological problems caused by work or family pressures,cultivate teachers' psychological capital,and maintain their physical and mental health while performing work and family roles.(4)Family support plays a significant intermediary role in the relationship between perceived organizational support and psychological capital(a negatively intermediary role).The study found that both family support and organizational support can impose positive influences on university teachers.There is a mutual substitution effect between them which both help to shape the individual positive psychological capital.(5)Work-family border flexibility plays a negative intermediary role in the relationship between work involvement and work-family enrichment.The specific explanation for this conclusion is that in Chinese social and cultural contexts,work is usually regarded as priority.For university teachers with highly professional identity,the work pressure is increasing while teaching and research tasks are heavy,resulting in the loss of working resources,and university teachers with high border flexibility focus more physiology,cognition,and emotion resources on the work field,thus weakening the work-family enrichment.(6)Work-family border flexibility plays a negative intermediary role in the relationship between psychological capital and work-family enrichment.The professional characteristics of high work pressure requires university teachers to fully mobilize various resources including psychological capital to focus on work,and the high work-family border flexibility provides an objective possibility for this focus.At the same time,the weak edge makes individual cross-border behavior easier,which will inevitably increase the loss of personal resources and erode family life for high-demand and full-time teachers.Therefore,with the increase in work-family flexibility,the psychological capital's effect on work-family enrichment has weakened.The innovations of the thesis are as follows:(1)The study deepens and expands the mechanism research of perceived organizational support's effects on work-family enrichment.Based on the resource conservation and role accumulation theories,the study tries to integrating supportive resources at organizational level and individual resources and exploring the driving mechanism of the work-family enrichment triggered by the cross-border effect of resource coordination.A review shows that as the study of work-family enrichment started relatively late,the current theoretical and empirical studies are relatively fragmentary,and there is little comprehensive or systematic analysis and exploration on the integration of perceived organizational support,job involvement,psychological capital,and work-family enrichment.Therefore,this study puts them in an overall framework and tries to propose a main logical line based on the “environmental stimulation-organism-response” framework.And the study exploratively constructs and verified the research model that perceived organizational support influences work-family enrichment under the job involvement and psychological capital's double intermediary effects,which enriches the mechanism research of perceived organizational support's effects on work-family enrichment.(2)The study pays special attention to and explores the particular and limitative effects of work-family border on the work-family enrichment,which has enriched the empirical research on the influence of work-family border theory in diverse occupational groups.Based on the role accumulation theory,the previous researches on work-family enrichment generally believed that the resources accumulated in multiple-role activities may exceed the losses,thereby forming a mutually beneficial phenomenon between the roles.Aiming at full-time university teachers with strong professional skills,high requirements for innovation,flexible working hours,and a blurring work-family border,the study finds that teacher' s over-commitment may cause work to erode family border under the specific conditions of strong work-family border flexibility,revealing a new research perspective of work-family border.(3)The study analyzes the different ways and effects of organizational support and family support in the work-family relationship of University teachers,which provides a new research perspective of Social Support Theory.The study attempts to bring organizational support and family support,these two main dimensions under social support constructs respective as principle variable and moderating variable into research framework.Meanwhile,aiming at the predicament university teachers face in work-family relations,the study verifies and explains the direct influence of perceived organizational support on work-family enrichment and their mutual effects under the moderation of family support.In the existing literature,organizational support and family support are often regarded as same antecedent variables or moderating variables,or both are integrated under social support constructs.The exploration of the research gives new explanations toward the different roles of both in university teachers' work-family relations.The application value of this research and the enlightenment of management are mainly reflected in:(1)We should strengthen the organizational support for teachers and improve their job involvement and performance.The study believes that to make teachers gain a higher sense of organizational support,the hardware conditions are far from enough,while a full range of services must be provided,scientific incentives should be implemented,And a three-dimensional support system should be constructed,thus actively building a soft environment where talents can be retained and made full use of.That is,promoting the transformation of human resource management emphasis in universities from absorbing talents to serving and cultivating talents.(2)We should pay attention to teachers' mental health and enhance teachers' psychological capital.The job characteristics of university teachers determine its strong sense of professional identity and self-worth realization as well as its challenging and stressful features.Especially for young teachers while overworked,psychological problems also occur frequently.Therefore,universities should strengthen the attention and counseling to teachers' mental health,formulate the incentive mechanism of research evaluation to encourage innovation and tolerance,building an academic atmosphere where freedom and inclusiveness are advocated to reduce the pressure of teachers and strengthen their confidence and toughness in coping with setbacks.(3)We should strengthen teachers' self-management,self-adjustment,and promote work-family balance and enrichment.University teachers should follow the law of talent development and the characteristics of work-family enrichment,and learn to self-adjust,reasonably and selectively perform work and family roles in rhyme.Teachers should not only avoid over-commitment but also avoid interfering work by strong flexibility and try to realize the work-family balance.