Research On The Impact Of Communication Openness To Organizational Commitment Based On Superior-Subordinate Relationships

Organizational commitment is one of the important research fields of organization behavior. Since 1960s, especially in recent twenty years, many researchers in the field of HRM and organization behavior are attracted by the topic. As a very important factor influencing employee's dynamic behavior, organization commitment is a better predictive variable of the employee's turnover rate and job performance. Therefore, researching the factors influencing organization behavior and putting forward relevant measures will contribute a lot to the management practice.According to literature review, we found that the exiting researches on organizational commitment of employees mainly focused on its consequences, but hadn't come to a consensus on its antecedents. Especially, there are few researches about the relationship between organizational commitment and organization communication. However, as Simon had said in 1976: no communication, no organizations. So it's worth discussing the impact of organization communication on organizational commitment. Communication openness is a central variable in organizational communication, and openness and overcoming the obstacle in communication can cause huge benefits for organization. Also, especially fewer studies from the angle of supervisor-subordinate relationship to discuss it. However, we know supervisor-subordinate relationship is an important concept to understand their relationship from the perspective of Social Exchange Theory. Generally speaking, communication openness will impact the supervisor-subordinate relationship and interaction. Through the interaction, communication openness can play role on organizational commitment. Therefor, this research chooses LMX and Guanxi which are both based on social exchange theory as two variables to study supervisor subordinate relationship. LMX represents the work relationship built between supervisor and subordinate in formal organizations, and the exchange level can be high or low. Guanxi is the special factor influencing the interpersonal relationship in Chinese societies, and guanxi can also be good or bad. So, the similarity of the two relationships could be the function mechanism of organizations.These former literatures just comply with the initial basic framework of this dissertation. That is communication openness impacts on supervisor-subordinate relationship and ulteriorly influences organizational commitment of the employees. This research mainly discussed the following three aspects by summarizing the related studies inland and overseas: 1. what is the extent to impacts that several dimensions of communication openness imposed on organizational commitment; 2. how the impacts that communication openness influences LMX and Guanxi; 3. whether communication openness can influence organizational commitment of employees through LMX or Guanxi in Chinese context. And the study is based on the hypothesis as follows: 1. Communication openness will be positively associated with organizational commitment; 2. Communication openness will be positively associated with LMX; 3. LMX will mediate the relationship between Communication openness and organizational commitment; 4. Communication openness will be positively associated with Guanxi; 5. Guanxi will mediate the relationship between Communication openness and organizational commitment.This research is established in Chinese settings, and uses COM, JOM, and Guanxi with supervisor and organizational commitment to measure a sample of 225 employees from Chinese enterprises. We used SPSS15.0 for data analysis, including the descriptive analysis, the correlation analysis and the regression analysis etc. By statistic analysis, the research attempts to examine the impacts of communication openness on organizational commitment and the mediating effects of leader-member exchange and Guanxi in this process. Also, we explored the impacts of age, education, position level on these variables. The main findings are showed as follows. Firstly, communication openness is significantly related to organizational commitment. Secondly, communication openness is significantly related to LMX and Guanxi. Thirdly, Guanxi fully mediates the relationship between communication openness and organizational commitment. Fourthly, LMX doesn't mediate the relationship between communication openness and organizational commitment directly. At last, education are significantly related to LMX and organizational commitment, position level are significantly related to Guanxi.This research finds that personal guanxi between supervisor and subordinate plays an important role in Chinese enterprises, and the suggestions for Chinese enterprises from the result are as follows. Chinese enterprises should build effective formal communication networks to ensure that any information can transmit without obstacle. Supervisors should be more open to subordinates, especially strengthen the initiative of communication. In addition to formal LMX, supervisors need to keep good personal guanxi with subordinates, and spend time caring them to win subordinates'commitment, thus increase employees'organizational commitment.There is much originality in this paper. First, the current research is one of the first few studies that examined the relationship between communication openness and organizational commitment. Secondly, this research adopted LMX and Guanxi as the mediators of communication openness to employees'work attitudes which puts forward a new explanatory insight to this field and develops the process of researches. Thirdly, this paper tries to fill up the blank of the relationships of communication openness, LMX and Guanxi in Chinese settings. Certainly, there are some shortcomings in the research. For example, it has the limits of data collection and sample quantity, and it's not so thorough to expound the mediate effects of Guanxi in communication openness and organizational commitment theoretically etc. As the researches about the relationships of communication openness, LMX and Guanxi in Chinese context is limited, the results of this study needs the support of other empirical researches, and future researches can also improve in aspects of sample selection and data collection.