The Impact Mechanism Of Idiosyncratic Deals On Personal Initiative Of R&D Employees

In a complex and volatile business environment,the personal initiative of employees is increasingly important to the success of an enterprise.As a work behavior of self-starting,proactive,and persistent to overcome difficulties,personal initiative can enable employees to go beyond formal requirements and complete tasks outstandingly.For R&D employees,the display of personal initiative will help them overcome difficulties to complete the innovation work excellently and promote organizational innovation spontaneously.However,this behavior only depends on the self-starting of employees,and the organization is difficult to specify in advance,even more difficult to standardize,how to effectively stimulate the personal initiative of R&D employees and promote the sustainable development of enterprises is a critical and practical problem that academia and managers need to solve urgently.Idiosyncratic deals(I-deals),as special,individualized work arrangements,can be a proven way to motivate personal initiative of R&D employees.Through literature review of i-deals,it is found that i-deals positively affect employees’ job satisfaction,affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior.However,the research on the impact mechanism of i-deals on personal initiative is insufficient,the theoretical perspective is limited,the dynamic psychological process of employees has not been deeply explored,and the relationship between different types of i-deals and personal initiative has not been fully revealed.Therefore,based on the theory of self-regulation,this study introduces thriving at work as a mediation,and explores the impact mechanism of task and work responsibilities i-deals,flexibility i-deals on personal initiative,as well as the differential effects of the two types of i-deals.At the same time,from the perspectives of realistic situations that R&D employees often face and team member relationships,the moderating effects of challenge stressors and advice network centrality are explored.This study firstly reviews the relevant literature on key variables,build a theoretical model and put forward research hypotheses.Secondly,the measurement tools were improved through pre-investigation,and then a large-scale formal investigation was carried out to obtain412 R&D employees’ data through employee-supervisor data pairing.Then,UCINET6.0 is used to calculate the advice network centrality of each employee,SPSS23.0 and MPLUS7.0software are used to test the hypothesis,and draw research conclusions:(1)Task and work responsibilities i-deals and flexibility i-deals have a positive impact on the personal initiative of R&D employees,and the former have a stronger positive impact.(2)Thriving at work mediates two types of i-deals and personal initiative respectively.(3)Challenging stressors positively moderate the positive relationship between task and work responsibilities i-deals and thriving,while the moderating effect of flexibility i-deals was not significant.(4)Advice network centrality positively moderates the positive relationship between flexibility i-deals and thriving,while the moderating effect on task and work responsibilities i-deals is not significant.Finally,based on the research conclusions,management suggestions are put forward:organizations can implement i-deals,a personalized human resource management policy,and provide different types of i-deals according to the differentiated needs of R&D employees,to effectively stimulate personal initiative of employees.In addition,on the one hand,organizations should make good use of stress factors and turn pressure into motivation;on the other hand,employees should be encouraged to establish extensive advice network connections at work,to maximize the positive effect of i-deals.