What threatens retail employees' thriving at work under leader‐member exchange? The role of store spatial crowding and team negative affective tone

• Author: Cheris W. C. Chow,Angela J. Xu,Raymond Loi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21959
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

What threatens retail employees' thriving at work under

leader-member exchange? The role of store spatial crowding

and team negative affective tone

Angela J. Xu

1

| Raymond Loi

2

| Cheris W. C. Chow

2

1

School of Management, Jinan University,

Guangzhou, P. R. China

2

Department of Management and Marketing,

University of Macau, Macau SAR, China

Correspondence

Angela J. Xu, School of Management, Jinan

University, No. 601, Huangpu Avenue West,

Tianhe District, Guangzhou, P. R. China

Email: xujieangela@163.com

Funding information

Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and

Social Science, Grant/Award Number:

GD18YGL08; Jinan University Management

School Funding Program, Grant/Award

Number: GY18010; Universidade de Macau,

Grant/Award Number:

MYRG2014-00090-FBA

Thriving at work is a positive psychological state that captures employees' joint experience of

learning and vitality. Building on the socially embedded model of thriving , we first propose the

positive relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX) and retail employees' thriving at

work. We then explore store spatial crowding as a contextual constraint on this relationship. To

better reveal this contextual impact, we further contend that team negative affective tone medi-

ates the cross-level moderating effect of store spatial crowding on the LMX–thriving linkage.

Using two-wave survey data collected from retail employees and their store managers across

89 stores of a grocery retail chain, we found empirical evidence on our multilevel-mediated

moderation model. This study highlights the importance of considering wider contextual fea-

tures as boundary conditions to thriving. Our results suggest theoretical modifications to the

existing thriving model and offer implications on the practical interventions that retailing organi-

zations can take to develop a thriving workforce.

KEYWORDS

leader–member exchange (LMX), store spatial crowding, team negative affective tone, thriving

at work

1|INTRODUCTION

“Increased crowding in the workplace …strain

[s] workplace relationships”

(Sander, 2018)

Imagine that on the floor of a grocery store, fixtures and mer-

chandise are inappropriately stacked to accommodate more products.

The shelves and display racks are closely placed that only one person

can pass through at a time. The inventories are piled high next to the

cashier counter. Obviously, a spatially crowded store restricts

employees’body movement in their daily work. A more critical issue is

that spatial crowding may strain workplace relationships with supervi-

sors, which put any resources or support provided by supervisors to

develop their subordinates in vain. This remains a core challenge to

the human resource management in retail stores.

Heightened business and academic interest in developing human

capital and building a sustainable workforce has put “how to enable

employee thriving at work”a hot topic in the past decade (Cullen,

Gerbasi, & Chrobot-Mason, 2018; Paterson, Luthans, & Jeung, 2014;

Prem, Ohly, Kubicek, & Korunka, 2017; Spreitzer, Porath, & Gibson,

2012; Zhu, Law, Sun, & Yang, 2019). Thriving at work refers to a posi-

tive psychological state in which employees experience both a sense

of learning (i.e., acquiring and applying new knowledge and skills) and

vitality (i.e., having energy and zest) (Spreitzer, Sutcliffe, Dutton,

Sonenshein, & Grant, 2005, p. 538). Thriving employees benefit orga-

nizational effectiveness in terms of better well-being and work perfor-

mance, more citizenship behavior and innovation, and less

absenteeism (Carmeli & Spreitzer, 2009; Porath, Spreitzer, Gibson, &

Garnett, 2012; Wallace, Butts, Johnson, Stevens, & Smith, 2016;

Walumbwa, Muchiri, Misati, Wu, & Meiliani, 2018).

Spreitzer et al.'s (2005) socially embedded model of thriving

describes how different local work contexts with particular resources

and/or social structural features enable individual thriving. Although

research evidence of the salutary effects of work contexts (such as

knowledge, coworker support, positive meaning, and employee

involvement climate) is accumulating (Niessen, Sonnentag, & Sach,

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21959

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