The Relationship between Work Setting and Employee Behaviour : A Study of a Critical Linkage in the Organizational Change Process

It is argued that the behaviour of organizational members is influenced to a large extent by characteristics of their work settings. Furthermore, since individuals must change their behaviour in order for organizational improvement to occur, planned organizational change can be viewed as an attempt to change organizational work setting characteristics such that individuals will adopt new, desirable behaviours. Based on these premisses, explores the relationship between organizational work settings and behaviour. In particular, three work setting features that are often the target of intervention activity – goals, managerial behaviour, and job designs – are examined regarding their relationships with a set of employee behaviours relevant to planned organizational change and, potentially, organizational performance. Only goals demonstrate a significant relationship with the frequency of these behaviours. Furthermore, the three work setting variables do not appear to have an interactive effect on behaviour. Consistency in behaviour is found to be related to the extent to which important dimensions of the work setting variables are congruent with each other. Implications for future research are discussed.