ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO THE EMPLOYEE-ORGANIZATION RELATIONSHIP - DOES INVESTMENT IN EMPLOYEES PAY OFF

This article describes four approaches to the employee-organization re lationship, as defined from the employer's perspective. An empirical s tudy of employees from ten companies found support for the basic hypot hesis that employee responses differ under the four types of relations hip. In general, employees performed better on core tasks, demonstrate d more citizenship behavior, and expressed a higher level of affective commitment to an employer when they worked in an overinvestment (by t he employer) or mutual investment relationship than when they worked i n a quasi-spot-contract or underinvestment relationship. These results were obtained even after we controlled for several other variables th at could affect employee performance and attitudes.