Participant characteristics and organizational processes: a Hong Kong case study. Available to Purchase

Explores relationships between relevant work setting variables in a Hong Kong organization. The study examined a set of Western assumptions in terms of structural properties of centralization and formalization and the view that they will be negatively associated with workplace responses of motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, while an enriched job content will be positively related to employee responses. There was empirical support for most of the connections of this framework, but formalization was observed to have positive relationships with employee perceptions and affections. In addition, there was evidence that the responses of the incumbents were influenced by the assessed demographic characteristics. These results provide further evidence that organizational members pay moderate attention to demographic attributes, yet this factor has not been a prominent component of contemporary job design research. The findings are reported in terms of the need to consider both demographic and sociocultural effects when explaining responses of individual employees.