a social influence analysis of perceived organizational support

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organization’s hierarchy (Levine & Moreland, 1986). Therefore, I examine the impact of advice, friendship, and multiplex role model ties that employees maintain with coworkers on similarity in POS. Figure 2 provides a graphical depiction of the expected relationships between different social network ties and similarity in POS. In accordance with social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978), I expect that employees will have POS that is similar to the POS of their strong advice ties because employees will use advice ties to better understand what is happening in the organization. Organizational members perceive and make sense of organizational policies, practices, and procedures, as well as specific occurrences such as firings of specific employees, in ways that are psychologically meaningful to them (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). Rentsch (1990) explored the relationship between accounting firm employees’ memberships in interaction groups and the meanings they attach to organizational events. She interviewed employees to find out what types of events were occurring in the organization and asked them to describe the events. Six weeks later, she came back and administered a survey in which employees were asked to match adjectives with the different events discussed in interviews. Following the survey, she gave employees a roster containing the names of all employees in the organization and asked them to indicate which employees they interacted with. She found that employees who interacted with one another frequently (interaction groups) assigned the same adjectives to the same organizational events, and that employees who were in different interaction groups assigned different adjectives to the same organizational events. While Rentsch’s study provided important results concerning the relationship between interaction and employees interpretations of organizational events, she did not measure the content of the ties between individuals in her study. Given the importance of advice ties in 47
disseminating organizational information, I argue that advice ties that will be most important in shaping employees’ interpretations of what happens in organizations, and therefore will be important in shaping employees’ POS. This is because employees go to their advice ties to get information that helps them to make sense of the organization, while they go to friends for counseling and companionship (Fisher, 1982). Indeed, a study of newly-hired accountants showed that employees’ advice ties were related to their knowledge of the organization, while friendship ties were not (Morrison, 2002). Further, advice ties were related to employees’ perceptions regarding the fairness of organizational policies and procedures as well as their beliefs about how fairly they were treated by supervisors (Umphress et al., 2003). By interacting with others in an advice network, beliefs about the organization will be shared either directly through discussion of organizational support or indirectly through conversations concerning other work-related topics. Through this interaction, individuals involved in advice relationships are exposed to others’ beliefs about organizational support. Hypothesis 1: An employee’s perceived organizational support will be positively related to the perceived organizational support of coworkers with whom that employee has strong advice relationships. Like advice ties, I argue that employees will adopt similar perceptions of support to those of their role-model advice ties. Such ties provide information about treatment provided by the organization. However, the fact that these advice ties also serve as role models is significant because employees emulate the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of role models. When employees are uncertain about how to interpret the treatment that they receive from the organization, the evaluations of role model advice ties will be influential, even more influential than advice ties. The more employees seek out their role models for information or advice related to organizational treatment in the organization, the more similar employees’ evaluations 48
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TITLE PAGE A SOCIAL INFLUENCE ANALY
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Copyright by Thomas J. Zagenczyk 20
Page 5 and 6: with the expectation that reciproca
Page 7 and 8: LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Hypothesize
Page 9 and 10: PREFACE Thank you to my chair, Audr
Page 11 and 12: epresentatives of the organization
Page 13 and 14: Researchers also consider the conte
Page 15 and 16: Exploring the effects of social inf
Page 17 and 18: CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW Orga
Page 19 and 20: Levinson’s work explained the lar
Page 21 and 22: Eisenberger and colleagues (1986) a
Page 23 and 24: In subsequent studies, researchers
Page 25 and 26: the organization is based on percei
Page 27 and 28: esearch exploring the antecedents o
Page 29 and 30: a manager with high formal status s
Page 31 and 32: to carry out tasks on their own, an
Page 33 and 34: occurs because the norm of reciproc
Page 35 and 36: on their daily tasks. Examining thi
Page 37 and 38: coworkers are able to provide infor
Page 39 and 40: when forming perceptions and evalua
Page 41 and 42: identifies with and interacts with
Page 43 and 44: Miles, and Grover (2003) showed tha
Page 45 and 46: instance, a researcher may find a p
Page 47 and 48: likely to discuss sensitive issues
Page 49 and 50: it does not require that the role m
Page 51 and 52: among tellers. In one branch, no se
Page 53 and 54: eside outside of the focal individu
Page 55: To test the effects of social influ
Page 59 and 60: less positive. Thus, the POS of the
Page 61 and 62: ties (and other combinations of str
Page 63 and 64: Research Setting Hypotheses were te
Page 65 and 66: network data concerning recurring i
Page 67 and 68: I explored these different requirem
Page 69 and 70: or not the employees with whom they
Page 71 and 72: frequent contact with person j, or
Page 73 and 74: employee held a leadership position
Page 75 and 76: correlation analysis has two steps.
Page 77 and 78: Organizational Support was .84, whi
Page 79 and 80: Table 5: Descriptive Statistics for
Page 81 and 82: Correlations. Two different types o
Page 83 and 84: Control Variables Table 7: Pearson
Page 85 and 86: Control Variables Table 9: Pearson
Page 87 and 88: Results of Hypotheses Tests using Q
Page 89 and 90: positions had perceptions of organi
Page 91 and 92: CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION AND CONCLU
Page 93 and 94: elationship may not have been consi
Page 95 and 96: social learning theory (Bandura, 19
Page 97 and 98: to provide false information is les
Page 99 and 100: Fourth, when studying social influe
Page 101 and 102: theoretical foundation of POS is so
Page 103 and 104: consistent with past research (Ibar
Page 105 and 106: employees who were widely regarded
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etween employees, only strong frien
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of structure and behavior. Academy
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organizational support. In J. A-M.
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Hammer, M. (1985). Implications of
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Kohlberg, L. (1963). Moral developm
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Mehra, A., Kilduff, M., & Brass, D.
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Rogers, E.M. (1995). Diffusion of i
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networks: An introduction to Markov
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Name of employee Yes Yes No No Name
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