Person-Organization Value Congruence Mediates the Relationship between Job Resources and Collective Psychological Ownership: The Case of Social Workers in China

Abstract

Recent research has suggested that job resources are positively associated with collective psychological ownership (CPO) held by social service workers. However, the psychological mechanisms that may explain how job resources relate to CPO are still unclear. The present study aimed to examine the mediating role of person-organization (P-O) value congruence in the relationship between job resources and CPO among social workers. Using a nationally representative sample of social workers (N = 5,883) collected in the First Wave of the China Social Work Longitudinal Study in 2019 (the CSWLS 2019), the results showed that job resources were positively associated with CPO (p < .001), and that P-O value congruence partially mediated the effects of job resources on CPO (the proportion mediated = 39.2%). The findings highlight the importance of job resources manifested in autonomy and social support as well as value congruence for enhancing social workers’ CPO toward their work organizations. Implications for both research and practice were discussed. Future studies are suggested to examine other antecedents of CPO and P-O value congruence and how CPO is formulated and developed in organizational contexts of social work and other human helping professions.

Keywords:

• Person-organization values congruence
• collective psychological ownership
• job resources
• autonomy
• social support
• social workers

Authorship

Kun Liang: designed the study, conducted data collection, and edited the article.

Xuebing Su: designed the study, conducted data analysis, drafted and edited the article.

Victor Wong: designed the study, drafted and edited the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Ethics Approval Statement & Consent Form

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Research Ethics Committee of the School of Public and Social Administration at the East China University of Science and Technology and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All participants were well informed about the objectives of the research and signed a consent form before joining the research.

Data Availability Statement

The dataset used for this manuscript belongs to the China Social Work Longitudinal Study 2019.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China National Social Science Fund under Grant No. 19CSH063 and Shanghai Social Science Foundation under Grant No. 2018BSH011. The authors thank the CSWLS program for making the data available for analysis.