Employee well‐being attribution and job change intentions: The moderating effect of task idiosyncratic deals

• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Xin Liu,Tae‐Yeol Kim,Xiaoming Zheng,Byron Y. Lee,Yaping Gong
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21998
• Date: 01 July 2020

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Employee well-being attribution and job change intentions:

The moderating effect of task idiosyncratic deals

Byron Y. Lee

1

| Tae-Yeol Kim

1

| Yaping Gong

2

| Xiaoming Zheng

3

| Xin Liu

4

1

China Europe International Business School

(CEIBS), Shanghai, China

2

Department of Management, School of

Business and Management, The Hong Kong

University of Science & Technology, Clear

Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

3

Department of Leadership and Organization

Management, School of Economics and

Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing,

China

4

Department of Organization and Human

Resources, Renmin Business School, Renmin

University of China, Beijing, China

Correspondence

Xiaoming Zheng, Department of Leadership

and Organization Management, School of

Economics and Management, Tsinghua

University, Beijing, 100084, China.

Email: zhengxm@sem.tsinghua.edu.cn

Funding information

National Natural Science Foundation of China,

Grant/Award Numbers: 71728005, 71771133;

Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada, Grant/Award Number:

Insight Grant 435-2019-0271

Abstract

We developed and tested a research model in which employee well-being human

resource (HR) attribution differentially influences the intention to change jobs across

organizations (i.e., external job change intention) versus that within the same organi-

zation (i.e., internal job change intention). Furthermore, we posited that task idiosyn-

cratic deals (I-deals) moderated the relationships between employee well-being HR

attribution and external and internal job change intentions. Results indicated that

employee well-being HR attribution was negatively related to external job change

intention, but positively related to internal job change intention. Further, task I-deals

significantly moderated the relationships between employee well-being HR attribu-

tion and external and internal job change intention. Specifically, employee well-being

HR attribution played a less important role in reducing external job change intention

when task I-deals were high rather than low. On the other hand, high task I-deals sig-

nificantly strengthened the positive relationship between employee well-being HR

attribution and internal job change intention. Our study extends the careers literature

by differentiating the impact of employee well-being HR attribution on job change

intentions within an organization compared with that across organizations and the

important role of supervisors in enhancing or mitigating these effects.

KEYWORDS

employee well-being HR attribution, external job change intention, internal job change

intention, task idiosyncratic deals

1|INTRODUCTION

Jobs are at the heart of the employment relationship and are consid-

ered the building blocks of careers (Baruch & Rosenstein, 1992).

Careers research has evolved from focusing on traditional organiza-

tional careers (i.e., job movements inside an organization) to a model

characterized by increased job mobility across and within organiza-

tional boundaries (Lyons, Schweitzer, & Ng, 2015; Sullivan & Baruch,

2009). However, external job changes(i.e., changes in jobs across orga-

nizational boundaries) and internal job changes (i.e., changes in jobs

within an organization) may have different implications for the organi-

zation and the employee (Inkson, Gunz, Ganesh, & Roper, 2012). For

example, research on job changes (e.g., Bidwell & Keller, 2014;

Bidwell & Mollick, 2015; DeVaro & Morita, 2013)have shown the dif-

ferent effects of external and internal job changes on the career out-

comes of employees and their ultimateimpact on firm performance.

Despite these advances, existing studies have yet to examine the

differences between external and internal job change intentions.

External job change intention is defined as the intention to change

jobs by moving to a different organization. Internal job change

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21998

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provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2019 The Authors Human Resource Management Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Hum Resour Manage. 2020;59:327–338. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm 327