Organizational public value and employee life satisfaction: the mediating roles of work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior

Abstract

Building on Meynhardt’s public value concept, which has been developed to make transparent an organization’s contributions to the common good, we investigate the influence of organizational common good practices in the perceptions of employees (measured as public value) on employees’ work attitudes and life satisfaction. The proposed model is tested on a sample of 1045 Swiss employees taken from the 2015 Swiss Public Value Atlas data-set. Study findings reveal that organizational public value is positively related to employee life satisfaction, and that this relationship is partially mediated by work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Further, we show that employee common good orientations strengthen the positive impact of organizational public value on employee work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Results also provide evidence that the indirect effects of organizational public value on employee life satisfaction via work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior are stronger at higher employee common good orientation levels.

Keywords:

• Public value
• life satisfaction
• work engagement
• organizational citizenship behavior
• CSR
• common good
• social performance

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.