The Empirical Research Of The Influence Of Job Characteristics On Counterproductive Work Behavior

Since Katz (1964) put forward the concept of the extra-role behaviors, most of the researchers in the field of organization behaviors focused their studies of staff behaviors on their positive extra-role behaviors. However, with the increasingly fierce global competition and rapid development of science and technology, enterprises are confronted with more complex internal and external environments. The competition grows fiercer among staff and the passive behaviors of staff keep emerging in the workplace. Therefore, since the 1990s, research on counterproductive work behaviors has gradually aroused the attention of organizational behaviorists and management practitioners at home and abroad. Counterproductive work behaviors, widespread in all varieties of organizations, have posed severe threats to organizations.Why would staff carry out counterproductive work behaviors? Many scholars have studied the antecedent variables of counterproductive work behaviors, among which the work factor is an aspect worthy of attention. Work takes up most time and energy of human beings and has important impacts on the attitudes, motivations and work-related behaviors of individuals. So, what are the impacts of job characteristics on counterproductive work behaviors? Is it true that the more positive characteristics the work owns, the less counterproductive work behaviors staff would carry out? In addition, since both job characteristics and counterproductive work behaviors are multi-dimensional conceptions, does there exist a certain kind of correlation between different job characteristics and different counterproductive work behaviors? Besides, counterproductive work behaviors are behavioral responses initiatively exercised by individuals and produced by the subjective cognition of individuals, so what is the internal mechanism in which the job characteristics affect counterproductive work behaviors?Based on related theories of job characteristics, psychological ownership and counterproductive work behaviors, this dissertation took psychological ownership as the mediation variable and constructed a research model of "job characteristics-psychological ownership-counterproductive work behaviors".Through theoretical and empirical analyses, it explored the relationships among job characteristics, psychological ownership and counterproductive work behaviors as well as the mediating role of psychological ownership.Among the six chapters in it, this dissertation firstly sorted out the related researches on job characteristics, counterproductive work behaviors and psychological ownership at home and abroad, discovered the shortcomings of current studies and then established research directions and research contents based on them. Secondly, it expounded and analyzed the theories of job characteristics, affective events and social exchanges, which laid a foundation for proposing hypotheses and establishing models in the following research. Thirdly, it defined job characteristics, counterproductive work behaviors and psychological ownership and proposed research hypotheses and theoretical models of the relationships among them. Finally, it ascertained the initial measurement scales of job characteristics, counterproductive work behaviors, psychological ownership and personal background information and modified the scales through pretests so as to form formal questionnaires. By selecting staff from 23 enterprises from 10 cities including Shenyang, Huludao, Dalian, Harbin, Changchun, Beijing, Taiyuan, Wuhan, Xi’an and Wuxi as samples, it adopted the integrated methods of literature research and questionnaire survey, took SPSS17.0 and AMOS18.0 as the tools for questionnaire statistical analyses, conducted reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis on data and verified the proposed hypotheses in this dissertation.The creativity of this research mainly lies in the following aspects. (1) It introduced the new mediating variable---psychological ownership in a creative way, constructed the research model of "job characteristics-psychological ownership-counterproductivework behaviors" and explored the relationships among them; (2) It broke the limitations of single dimension research existing psychological ownership and researched psychological ownership from psychological ownership for organization and psychological ownership for job.(3)Empirical methods were adopted to verify the relationships between job characteristics of various dimensions and psychological ownership of various dimensions so as to certify and expand the theoretical analyses of Pierce,et al on the relationship between core job characteristics and job-based psychological ownership.Research Conclusions:(1) Job characteristics had significant negative impacts on the counterproductive work behaviors of the staff. (2) Job characteristics had significant positive impacts on psychological ownership. (3) Psychological ownership had significant negative impacts on the counterproductive work behaviors of the staff. (4) Psychological ownership played a partial mediation role in the process where job characteristics had impacts on the counterproductive work behaviors of the staff.This dissertation obtained the following management suggestions from the research conclusions. (1) Organizations could reduce the phenomena of counterproductive work behaviors through enhancing job enrichment. (2) How to improve the job characteristics of the staff should become an important issue for organizations to pay attention to. (3) The psychological ownership of the staff should be improved during the practices of organizational management.In the end, it pointed out the shortcomings of this research and set out visions for future research.