KOREAN KNOWLEDGE WORKERS’ JOB AUTONOMY AND WORKPLACE OUTCOMES: THE ROLE OF JOB CRAFTING AND LEADER-MEMBER EXCHANGE QUALITY

Open Access
- Author:
- Lee, Jae Young
- Graduate Program:
- Workforce Education and Development
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 01, 2018
- Committee Members:
- William J. Rothwell, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
William J. Rothwell, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Wesley Edward Donahue, Committee Member
Judith A. Kolb, Committee Member
Rama B Radhakrishna, Outside Member
Pui-Wa Lei, Special Member - Keywords:
- job autonomy
LMX
job crafting
performance
work engagement - Abstract:
- The primary purpose of this study is to better understand the relationship between knowledge workers’ job autonomy and their work outcomes in the context of large Korean for-profit organizations. The research framework utilized identified job autonomy as an independent variable and work engagement and performance as dependent variables. Job crafting was proposed to mediate the main relationships, and the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) was hypothesized to moderate the relationship between job autonomy and job crafting. A survey method was used to collect data from 14 large for-profit Korean organizations, and 562 valid responses comprised the final dataset. The collected data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings of this study revealed that job autonomy increased job crafting behaviors, which subsequently translated into greater engagement and better performance. From a bootstrapping, it was found that the indirect effects were statistically significant. In addition, the relationship between job autonomy and job crafting was stronger under high LMX quality conditions than under low LMX conditions. These results expand our understanding of the process and conditions governing the relationship between job autonomy and performance. The findings of this study are expected to enrich theoretical discussions about the research variables and contribute to practices in the human resource development (HRD) field.