Chloé Stievenard

Student Number: 1436023

Reading Summary:

The paper I read is called: “Alternative Approaches to the Employee-

Organization Relationship: Does Investment in Employees Pay off?”. It was
written by: Anne S. Tsui, Jone L. Pearce, Lyman W. Porter and Angela M. Tripoli.
It has been published by the Academy of Management Journal Vol. 40, No. 5 (Oct.,
1997), pp. 1089-1121

1. What research question is being asked in this paper?

The research questions being asked in this paper are the following: Is the desired
flexibility actually being realized through these approaches? (Approaches =
“types of flexibility for an organization. One of these approaches is based on a
pure economic exchange model and attempts to create a market like flexibility so
that the employer is free to hire and fire workers. The other is based on a
combined economic and social exchange model and attempts to create a clan like
flexibility by developing and encouraging employees to adopt permeable and
expandable work roles. In exchange, the employer offers some degree of
employment security to the employees). Taking a broader look at the impact of
these approaches, in what ways are they affecting the nature and quality of
employee performance and the attitudes employees hold toward the
organizations?

2. What are the real contributions of this paper?

This study represents a relatively comprehensive attempt to investigate the

performance and attitudinal responses of employees to alternative employer-
defined employment relationships.

The results obtained are encouraging and suggest several important topics for
future research.  Contribution to theory.
These results support increased use of involvement teams or self-managing
groups by employers.  Contribution to the profession.

3. Why would this paper be accepted by a top-ranked journal?

There a many reasons why would this paper be accepted by a top ranked journal:

First of all, to be accepted in a top ranked journal the article should follow the
scheme below, which it does:

• Introduction
• Theory—or theoretical basis
• Data: Descriptive statistics
• Results
• Tests and/or implications of results
• Conclusions/implications: Should put in context of literature/ what the
author has added.

Then the research question is interesting and questions an important question in

the study of how people in organization react. Even if this field has been
investigated in the past, the research question goes deeper into the subject and is
very interesting.

The third reason is theory; the authors apply theories and then show how this
theory varies or how it can be used in another way. In this article, the authors
base themselves on self-categorization theory, a theory that has been
investigated by many other authors such as Kanter in 1977, O’Farrell and Harlan
in 1982, Jackson in 1991, and many more.

4. What are the strengths of this paper?

The first strength of the paper is the fact that it sits on very famous theories such
as the employee-organization-relationship strategy theory.
Big Sample: The sample consisted of 976 employees who occupied 85 different
jobs across the ten companies.

The researchers created four (7) hypothesis to test, which is a big strength. The
paper tests 7 hypotheses:

H1: Hypothesis 1. Employees' performance on core tasks will be the highest in

the quasi-spot-contract employee-organization relationship, second highest with
mutual investment, and third highest with overinvestment. It will be the lowest
in the underinvestment employee-organization relationship.

H2: Organizational citizenship behaviors will be higher under the mutual

investment employee-organization relationship than under the other three
employee organization- relationship approaches.

H3: Dependable continuance of employment by employees (intentions to stay)

will be lowest in the underinvestment employee-organization relationship, next
lowest under the quasi-spot contract, and next lowest under mutual investment.
It will be the highest in the overinvestment employee-organization relationship.

H4: Employee attendance will be highest in the mutual investment employee-

organization relationship, next highest with underinvestment, and lowest in the
overinvestment and quasi-spot-contract employee-organization relationships.

H5: Affective commitment by employees to an employer will be highest under

the mutual investment and overinvestment employee-organization-relationship
approaches and lowest under the quasi-spot-contract and underinvestment
approaches.

H6: Employees' perception of fairness will be lower in the underinvestment

employee-organization relationship than in any of the other three employee-
organization- relationship approaches.
H7: Employees in mutual investment employee organization relationships will
report greater trust in coworkers than will employees in any of the other three
types of employee-organization relationship.

They used: One independent variable (the employee organization- relationship

approaches)

And seven dependent variables (four performance and three attitudinal

measures).

Finally, they used control variables:

- To control for the effect of individual supervisors.
- Job level was included as a control variable
- Company was included as a control variable. Different companies may
have different overall postures toward employees or idiosyncratic
corporate cultures

5. In your opinion, what makes a good theory?

1. Parsimony: the ability to explain in relatively few terms and statements

2. Breadth of phenomena explained
3. Accuracy of predictions of new phenomena
4. Ability to be disproved

According to me a good theory is a theory that explains how a factor A is related

to a factor B by making connections/links between the two factors. Moreover, a
good theory is tested more than once and confirmed by the observation of the
researcher and it’s experimentation. I also think that a good theory is simple, and
easy to understand. I agree with Schutt who says that a good theory is: “A
logically interrelated set of propositions about empirical reality. »