Description
TitleThree essays on workplace complaining behavior
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-10 (degree)
Extent139 pages : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation includes three essays that focus on workplace complaining behavior (WCB) and cover a wide range of topics, including antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of workplace complaining. In the first essay, I create a typology of WCB based on its key dimensions and explore the type of complaining that brings about a more efficient consequence of complaints. In the second and third essays, I explore various factors as antecedents. I use three types of data (i.e., lab study, field study, and archival data) to provide a robust and diverse empirical investigation on my proposed research framework.The first essay defines WCB and creates a framework for workplace complaining. In the essay, I establish WCB’s construct validity and develop and validate a measure of WCB based on a theoretically grounded definition of workplace complaining. First, I examine the content validity of the measure and then assess the psychometric properties (i.e., convergent validity, discriminant validity, and factor structure), after which, using a lab study conducted in the United States, I analyze whether and how different types of complaining (i.e., direct and indirect complaining) influence employees’ performance via emotions. The findings demonstrate that individuals who express indirect complaints achieve a higher performance via emotions than those who express direct complaints or do not complain at all.
In the second essay, based on a field study conducted in a Korean firm, I study whether and how employees express complaints differently to their supervisors or coworkers when they have a high- or low-quality leader–member exchange (LMX) and explore trust and job satisfaction as mediators. The results demonstrate that an individual with a higher LMX expresses more challenging and active complaints to a supervisor but fewer circuitous and passive complaints, with this relationship mediated by trust, whereas LMX will be negatively related to challenging, active, circuitous, and passive complaints to coworkers, with this relationship mediated by job satisfaction.
In the third essay, based on archival data scrapped from Glassdoor.com (155,000 samples), I study whether and how job satisfaction affects WCB and examine the mediating effects of organizational commitment and the moderating effects of employment status. I find robust results demonstrating that an individual who has higher job satisfaction expresses more instrumental complaints than an individual who has lower job satisfaction, whereas an individual who has higher job satisfaction expresses fewer noninstrumental complaints than an individual who has lower job satisfaction. Further, these relationships are mediated by organizational commitment.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionGraduate School - Newark Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.