Speaking up when values are aligned

The missing links of value congruence: evidence from the Thai healthcare workforce

PURPOSE

This study aims to investigate possible factors, such as trust in management and shared vision, that influence value congruence and its mediating effect on work engagement. It also explores how resilience, functioning as a moderator, could change the nature of the links between value congruence and its determinants.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

Data were collected through an online survey from 301 healthcare employees in Thailand. Hypotheses were tested and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and bootstrapping procedures.

FINDINGS

The results reveal that value congruence mediates the positive impacts of trust in management and shared vision on work engagement. Trust in management and shared vision translate into higher levels of value congruence, more so when employees are highly resilient.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

The findings suggest that healthcare administrators should design interventions to cultivate trustworthy leadership behaviors in daily operations while improving communication of the organization's overarching vision and objectives to help employees internalize and seamlessly integrate its core values into their own professional identities.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

Despite the extensive research on value congruence and its outcomes, little is known about its development. This study makes a valuable contribution by addressing these missing links, particularly in hospital settings. It also highlights how resource management explains the ways in which resilience in practice influences employees' value congruence at work.

The Impact of Leader-Member Relationships on Team Effectiveness Through Speaking Up and Silence: A Cross-Sectional Study in Rural Chinese Hospitals

Introduction

Although the importance of leader-member relationships in teamwork is acknowledged in literature, a deeper understanding of this relationship is lacking, especially in rural areas. The impact of leader-member relationships on team outcomes is especially important in rural Chinese hospitals as improving teamwork forms a national health reform priority in these hospitals. This study investigates how leader-member relationships (ie leader-member perceived similarity and power distance orientation) influence team outcomes (ie perceived quality of care and job satisfaction) via speaking up and silence.

Methods

An online questionnaire was completed by 1017 team members (ie doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals) of 300 teams in four rural Chinese hospitals in October 2022. The questionnaire measured leader-member perceived similarity, power distance orientation, speaking up, silence, perceived quality of care, job satisfaction and control variables. Multilevel mediation analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses.

Results

Leader-member perceived similarity and power distance orientation are positively related to speaking up (β=0.61, p<0.01; β=0.17, p<0.01 respectively) and to silence (β=0.41, p<0.01; β=0.63, p<0.01 respectively). Speaking up is positively related to the perceived quality of care (β=0.24, p<0.01; β=0.46, p<0.01) and job satisfaction (β=0.30, p<0.01; β=0.54, p<0.01), while the impact of silence is not significant. Finally, speaking up mediates the associations of both leader-member perceived similarity and power distance orientation with perceived quality of care (β=0.15, p<0.01; β=0.08, p<0.01 respectively) and job satisfaction (β=0.30, p<0.01; β=0.54, p<0.01 respectively).

Conclusion

Speaking up, rather than silence, contributes to team functioning by mediating the impact of leader-member relationships to team outcomes. Hospital management may therefore seek to stimulate speaking up by focussing on leader-member relationships: increasing leader-member similarity and promoting members' power distance orientation. However, any unintended effect of increased silence through these leader-member relationships is an important area of future research, which can adopt multidimensional models of speaking up and silence.

Let's work together, especially in the pandemic: finding ways to encourage problem-focused voice behavior among passionate employees

Purpose

This study seeks to unravel the relationship between employees' passion for work and their engagement in problem-focused voice behavior by identifying a mediating role of their efforts to promote work-related goal congruence and a moderating role of their perceptions of pandemic threats to the organization.

Design/methodology/approach

The research hypotheses were tested with quantitative data collected through a survey instrument administered among 158 employees in a large Portuguese-based organization that operates in the food sector, in the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The Process macro was applied to assess the moderated mediation dynamic that underpins the proposed theoretical framework.

Findings

Employees' positive work-related energy enhances their propensity to speak up about organizational failures because they seek to find common ground with their colleagues with respect to the organization's goals and future. The mediating role of such congruence-promoting efforts is particularly prominent to the extent that employees dwell on the threats that a pandemic holds for their organization.

Practical implications

The study pinpoints how HR managers can leverage a negative situation—employees who cannot keep the harmful organizational impact of a life-threatening virus out of their minds—into productive outcomes, by channeling positive work energy, derived from their passion for work, toward activities that bring organizational problems into the open.

Originality/value

This study adds to HR management research by unveiling how employees' attempts to gather their coworkers around a shared work-related mindset can explain how their passion might spur reports of problem areas, as well as explicating how perceived pandemic-related threats activate this process.

When supportive workplaces positively help work performance

Purpose

Although a supportive workplace is increasingly considered important for employees' performance, much of the evidence remains speculative, for example, it lacks offsetting mechanisms. This study addresses circumstances when perceived support helps and when it hurts work performance, depending on the mediating effects of job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction under the boundary conditions of perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and felt stress.

Design/methodology/approach

This study collected data using a questionnaire protocol that was adapted and refined from the original scales in existing studies. The sample consists of 900 employees from the public healthcare industry in Vietnam. To test the hypotheses, the partial least squares (PLS) technique was used.

Findings

This study finds that job autonomy, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction are important for the perceived support and work performance relationship in which perceived helpfulness of social media platforms plays a critical confounding role. The findings also confirm that felt stress negatively moderates the relationship between job satisfaction and work performance, weakening the effect job satisfaction has on employee work performance.

Originality/value

This study specifies the boundary conditions under which work performance is mostly affected while enhancing the understanding of how to reinforce intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. The findings offer organizational and human resource management (HRM) scholars and practitioners a closer look at perceived helpfulness of social media platforms and support the suggestions that autonomy-supportive workplaces are superior.