Formalization and employee thriving at work: a moderated mediation model including work engagement and centralization

PurposeUntil recently, scholars have begun to examine the contextual antecedents of employees thriving at work. A recent study has shown that one aspect of organizational structure/context (i.e. formalization) can be an important antecedent of employee thriving at work. However, scholars have urged doing research examining how different aspects of organizational structure can combinedly influence employee work outcomes such as thriving at work. Given that, the present paper proposes a theoretical model to unravel the mechanisms of how two aspects of organizational structure (i.e. formalization and centralization) may operate as the antecedents of employees thriving at work. In particular, the author draws on the Conservation of Resources Theory (COR) to hypothesize that employees' work engagement mediates the relationship between their perception of formalization and thriving at work. The author further hypothesizes that the indirect relationship between formalization and employee thriving at work is moderated by employees' perception of centralization, such that the relationship is stronger in the presence of a lower level of centralization than higher.Design/methodology/approach The author gathered data by employing a time-lagged survey design involving 136 full-time employees from different organizations.FindingsResults show that employee work engagement mediates the relationship between formalization and employee thriving at work. Further, the indirect relationship between formalization and employee thriving at work is stronger when the level of centralization is relatively low.Research limitations/implicationsFormalization is able to enact employees' thriving at work, particularly when organization implements relatively less centralized structure.Originality/valueThis study first introduces work engagement as a mediator in the formalization–employee thriving at work relationship and centralization as a moderator along this mediating process.

How Work–Family Conflict and Work–Family Facilitation Affect Employee Innovation: A Moderated Mediation Model of Emotions and Work Flexibility

This paper aims to verify the effects of work–family conflict and work–family facilitation on employee innovation in the digital era. Based on resource conservation theory, this study regards the work–family relationship as a conditional resource. Employees who are in a state of lack of resources caused by work–family conflict will maintain existing resources by avoiding the consumption of further resources to perform innovation activities; employees who are in a state of sufficient resources are more willing to invest existing resources to obtain more resources. In this study, 405 employees from enterprises in the Chinese provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Sichuan, and Guangdong, and in the municipality of Tianjin were selected as the research object. These enterprises are knowledge-based companies, and their employees frequently transfer knowledge at work. We collected questionnaires from the frontline employees of these companies. The results show that negative and positive emotions mediate the effect of work–family conflict and work–family facilitation on employee innovation. Moreover, work flexibility has a significant moderating effect on the mediating role of emotions between work–family facilitation and employee innovation behavior. In the digital era, when facing different work–family situations, employees need to pay attention to and dredge their negative emotions to avoid reducing their innovative behaviors due to self-abandonment; in parallel, they need to guide their positive emotions toward innovation, so as to promote their innovative consciousness and behavior. This paper expands the research perspective of employee innovation behavior.