An Empirical Study on the Organizational Trust, Employee-Organization Relationship and Innovative Behavior from the Integrated Perspective of Social Exchange and Organizational Sustainability

Ming-Chuan Yu,Sang-Bing Tsai,Qiang Mai,Yi Dai

doi:10.3390/su10030864

Abstract

Combining social exchange and inducement-contribution theory as our overarching theoretical framework, we examine innovative climate as a boundary condition and organizational trust as a mediating mechanism to explain when and how the employee-organization relationship (EOR) is associated with workplace innovative behavior. We conducted a field study using multi-source data to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that creativity positively predicted innovative behavior through organizational trust, and an innovative climate moderated the indirect effect of EOR on innovative behavior via organizational trust. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Highlights

Trust is very important in every aspect of social life
We further proposed a moderated-mediation model to test whether the indirect effect of employee-organization relationship (EOR) on innovative behavior via organizational trust is moderated by innovative climate, which can help us understand boundary mechanism that can impact relationship between EOR and innovative behavior via organizational trust
This study finds that organizational trust is the mediating mechanism between EOR and employee innovative behavior, and an innovative climate will moderate this mediating effect

Summary

Introduction

Trust is very important in every aspect of social life. It can promote individual friendships [1], create favorable bargaining and negotiation situations [2,3], and reduce transaction costs between individuals [4,5]. Collett, and Schaefer (2007) [8] stated that trust is the basic component of the effectiveness of social processes. Trust can be an effective predictor of employees’ positive attitudes and behaviors, such as cooperative behavior [9], organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) [10], organizational commitment [11], and employee loyalty [12]. Promoting employee’s trust in their organization is the ideal goal of all employers, but how to establish the organizational trust is still a challenge confronting organizations

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Results

Conclusion