a social influence analysis of perceived organizational support

find support for this hypotheses. Rather, she found that similarity or dissimilarity in perceptions
resulted from the specific psychological contract term evaluated, regardless of whether or not
that term was competitive or not. Eisenberger et al. (1986) proposed that organizational actions
that are non-reciprocated towards individual employees may be more strongly associated with
POS than support provided to all employees in the organization. He explained that this could
occur because individual support, such as promotions or pay raises etc., may be a stronger signal
to an individual that their contributions are valued and that they are cared for by the organization.
At the same time, not receiving such individual rewards may lead to lower levels of support.
When friends compete over such rewards, and one wins and one loses, it seems logical that their
perceptions of support would become dissimilar. On the other hand, friends may associate (and
thereby have POS that is more similar) when the organization provides beneficial treatment for
all employees in the organization, or when the organization provides favorable treatment to an
employees’ friends.
A third possible explanation for the absence of findings for hypotheses regarding strong
friendship ties is that the measure of friendship ties was inadequate. This is discussed further in
the limitations section of this chapter.
As was expected, employees generally did not have similar perceptions of organizational
support to those of employees with whom they maintained weak ties, with the exception of weak
role model ties. Weak role model ties – role models whom employees interacted with
infrequently and did not consider friends or advice-providers, were significantly related to
similarity in POS among employees. A possible explanation for this finding is that the behaviors
of these role models were observed by other employees who admired them. Based on watching
the way role models behaved, employees could have inferred their perceptions, consistent with
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