LMX And Work-related Flow-A Moderated Mediation Model

Since the 1990s, under the leader of an American psychologist-Seligman, research of positive psychology has set off a boom globally. Positive Psychology advocates people to explore the positive psychological quality and happiness of human life. Recently, in the field of organizational behavior, some scholars have called for researchers to concern about workplace positive organizational behavior (positive organizational behavior, POB) (Luthans,2002).Flow is one of the core concepts of positive psychology, and it means an emotional state that people totally focus on their work that they forget the things around him or her (Csikszentmihalyi,1988,1990,1997). In 2005, Bakker formally introduced this concept of into the field of organizational behavior and specifically defined it, making it become one of the research hotspots in recent years. Many studies have shown that flow will have a positive impact on job performance, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. There are also studies exploring what factors will lead to employees’flow at work and these studies are all from the perspective of job characteristics and job design to predict this experience. But the author believes that since immersion is a positive emotional and psychological experience, we should be more from the perspective of psychology and personal resources to probe its antecedents.Many studies regarding leadership are insist that the leader member exchange is positively related to employees’engagement on work, but there is no research to explain by what psychological mechanisms leader-member exchange leads to dedicated staff at work. Are all the employees able to convert their perceived LMX into the flow state at work through self-motivation and emotional regulation? In order to solve these two problems, based on the Job demand-resource theory (JD-R), self-determination theory (self-determination theory) and social exchange theory (social exchange theory), the author proposed a moderated mediation model, in which the author suggests that psychological empowerment will mediate the relationship between leader-member exchange and flow. And the mediation effect will be stronger when employees score high in emotional intelligence, compared with those who have lower level of emotional intelligence.In the study design part, this article verified the same model with two completely different samples (219 frontline staff in food service industry and 209 employees from the assembly line in the manufactory industry). Then the author did the reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis with SPSS. Hypothesis testing used a method which is described by Preacher et.al (2007)、Hayes (2012)�'�Edward et.al (2007) to verify the moderated model. Data results show that the moderated mediation model is supported in the food industry but not the manufactory industry. Finally, the author lists the theoretical and practical significances of this article and notes the possible research directions for future researchers in the LMX and flow theory.