In recent years, the employee turnover rate for China’s youth labor market has been increasing, thus sparking many social issues. By incorporating social cognitive career theory, cognitive evaluation theory and a job demands-resources model, this study aims to compare levels of employee job engagement and examine the roles of motivation in enhancing job engagement and lowering turnover intention. Further, we try to reveal the moderating effects of feedback and self-efficacy in these processes. The research was divided into two stages. In December 2017, the survey was distributed to new employees in China with a total of 409 samples. A second survey was then distributed to the same respondents one year later. The data collection for stage 2 was completed in February 2019 with a sample size of 245. The empirical results showed that only self-efficacy moderated intrinsic motivation for job engagement. Both feedback and self-efficacy negatively moderated the influence of extrinsic motivation and positively moderated the influence of intrinsic motivation on turnover intention. The findings suggest that the key to improve employee engagement relies on maintaining their intrinsic motivation. In conclusion, implications for retaining talented young employees and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Purpose/Research Question: Managers of organizations play a significant role in promoting sustainability by enhancing employee job satisfaction and employee creativity. Despite the number of studies on employee job satisfaction, much remains unknown regarding the mediating role of employee job satisfaction in the relationship between management characteristics (such as supervisor humility and abusive supervision) and employee creativity. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the links between supervisor humility, abusive supervision, and employee creativity are mediated by employee job satisfaction. Design/Methodology: We collected data from 352 highly skilled employees of manufacturing organizations in the Republic of Korea by conducting an online survey. A structural equation modeling procedure was used to evaluate the validity of the proposed hypotheses. Findings/Results: The results demonstrated that supervisor humility is positively related to employee job satisfaction, while abusive supervision is negatively related to employee job satisfaction. The findings also indicated that employee job satisfaction mediates the relationships between supervisor humility, abusive supervision, and employee creativity. Originality/Value: This work is the first to evaluate employee job satisfaction as a mediator of the link between characteristics of management (such as supervisor humility and abusive supervision) and employee creativity.