Supervisory Favors' Effect on Chinese Employees' Work Engagement and Satisfaction with Supervisor: What the Full VS Partial Mediating Role of Supportive Leadership Implies

摘要

It is widely documented that in Chinese organizations, employees' guanxi (personal relationship) with their supervisors greatly influence employee performance and development. Therefor it is a particular organizational behavior in China that employees spend quite a lot of their energy to develop guanxi with their supervisor for gaining supervisory favors. Based on the particular truth that supervisor-subordinate guanxi is the product of mixed exchanges of both work and non-work (social and economic) interactions, we propose a subtle theoretical model supposing that supportive leadership fully mediates supervisory favors' (the indicator of employees' guanxi with their supervisor) effect on work engagement but partially on satisfaction with supervisor. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis of empirical data quite support the hypothesized model. The findings may add our understanding of the advantages and the disadvantages of supervisor-subordinate guanxi, and have useful practical implications.