Jie Tang

This study examines how two types of workplace fun—sociality-oriented fun and assistant-oriented fun—relate to different forms of employees’ innovative behavior through positive affect and job satisfaction, drawing on the Affective Events Theory and the motivational dimensional model of affect. Data were collected from 17 supervisors and 116 employees in a Chinese state-owned electric power company using a supervisor-subordinate dyadic survey procedure. Mplus 8.3 was used to test the hypothesized model. The results show that sociality-oriented fun is positively associated with affect-driven innovative behavior through high-motivated positive affect, whereas assistant-oriented fun is positively associated with judgment-driven innovative behavior through the serial mediating role of low-motivated positive affect and job satisfaction. These findings provide a more differentiated understanding of how workplace fun may shape employee innovation and offer practical implications for designing fun activities that align with different innovation goals.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of person-organization (P-O) value congruence on employees’ coping with organizational change and to test the moderating effect of change event attributesvis-à-visvalue congruence and coping strategies.Design/methodology/approach: This paper uses a four-dimensional design to examine relationships between P-O value congruence and employees’ coping strategies. It discusses moderating effects of change attributes based on an elaboration likelihood model. The sample includes 242 employees from 34 organizations in China. Data are analyzed by a structural equation model, dominance analysis and hierarchical regression analysis.Findings: This paper provides empirical evidence that the four dimensions of P-O value congruence have different impacts on employees’ coping strategies with change; and the effects are moderated by employees’ perceived scope of change.Research limitations/implications: Future research should collect data at different time points during change processes to better understand the influence of value congruence on coping processes. To generalize robustly beyond this case-study requires research across a larger number of individuals and organizations.Practical implications: According to this paper, value congruence between employees and organizations could be better ensured by considering it as an important factor in the recruitment and selection processes, which is more effective in the long run. This is particularly pertinent for those organizations which experience frequent changes.Originality/value: First, this paper considers the influences of stable organizational factors and attributes of change events on employees’ coping abilities; these are both ignored in previous studies. Second, it develops a four-dimensional coping with change structure and a two-dimensional measure of change attributes in a Chinese context which are reliable and can thus be employed in future studies.