David J Paul Project Management Professional, Management Professor, Author and Small Business Manager
Do you support a culture of high mutual regard at work?
As a manager, it is important for you to figure out how your employees feel about your company, their role in it, and whether they want to ‘sign up and work hard’ or merely ‘stay at work and collect a pay check’. How they perceive their organization to support them is important, BUT only as that perception helps them feel cared for at work.
It appears that Positive Organizational Support (POS) carries perceptions about both the organization’s support of the employee as a person as well as the importance of the job performed by the employee. Recall that people want to do something important and they want to feel cared for. POS would therefore impact both commitment-related (affective) and job-related attitudes. Porter, Steers and Mowday (2005) report, “the relationship between affective commitment and job performance may be far more complex than a simple direct relationship”. As part of their study, Eisenberger, Rhoades, and Cameron (1999) used their short version of the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support (POS) to assess the employees’ perception of how the organization valued their contributions and cared about their well being as individuals. My research uses the results of that survey to help determine whether the belief in the strength of caring to improve engagement mediates (explains the relationship) or moderates (influences the strength of) the relationship between feeling cared for at work and engagement. It turns out that if you believe feeling cared for at work can impact your engagement, that is a weak moderator of your engagement at work, it does not explain (mediate) the relationship.
Eisenberger, Rhoades and Cameron (1999) offer as an aside their own interpretation of doing work that matters for people who care in this way, “Employees attribute (reward based freedom) autonomy to the organization’s commitment to their well-being and the organization’s positive evaluation of their contributions.” In order to determine what causes the Gen-Y workers (age 20 to 40 years) to feel cared for at work, my research focused on the directly reported experiences of the predominantly Gen-Y age group. It also looks at interpersonal facilitation as a pre-cursor to POS (possibly a bi-directional influence). This includes reasoned action as described in Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) and Ajzen (1991) who assert that individuals will choose to direct behaviors at the objects about which their attitudes are formed. In other words, a colleague who is your best friend at work will (according to some researchers) heavily influence your engagement at work. It is as if you are working on behalf of your friend.
It is with this in mind that it is important to operationalize and bring some level of clarity to what is meant by feeling cared for, valued, or connected in the workplace. At the end of the day, we uncovered and named 33 different ways that people report feeling cared for at work. As a manager, you need to find out which of those feeling cared for ways are important to your colleagues.
The Cameron Group, Inc. 