ENSURING SUSTAINABLE EMPLOYABILITY THROUGH MANAGERS’ BEHAVIORAL INTEGRITY
Master thesis, MscBA, specialization Human Resource Management University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business
ABSTRACT
With the legal retirement age increasing, ensuring employees’ sustainable employability becomes essential for organizations. However, there is also an increasing trend in levels of burnout and stress and this poses a risk for employees’ sustainable employability. Research suggests that managers’ congruence in words and deeds, also called behavioral integrity, leads to several positive outcomes that also partly indicates sustainable employability. This suggests that perceiving managers as acting with integrity might be a potent catalyst for sustainable employability. Testing this proposition, the present research examines if and under which conditions behavioral integrity increases sustainable employability. In line with previous research, I expect that the effect of behavioral integrity on positive organizational outcomes is mediated by value congruence. Extending existing studies, I expect the relation between behavioral integrity and value congruence is stronger when behavioral integrity relates to a moral topic. The hypotheses are tested through a questionnaire completed by 157 participants gathered through Prolific. Results show that behavioral integrity is positively associated with value congruence, and this effect is stronger when behavioral integrity refers to a moral topic. In addition, value congruence is associated with work engagement and affective commitment, but not employability. Moreover, the indirect effect of behavioral integrity on sustainable employability through value congruence was confirmed for work engagement and affective commitment, not for employability. Lastly, the interactive effect of perceived behavioral integrity and a moral topic on sustainable employability was also partly confirmed, in particular for work engagement at medium and low levels of morality and affective commitment at all levels of morality. These outcomes means a replication of the effect of behavioral integrity on value congruence, but as a contribution to literature I found that the effect became stronger when the topic referring to was seen as moral. While I did not found a direct effect of behavioral integrity on sustainable employability, an indirect effect through value congruence might mean that even when managers fail to behave with integrity, if organizations can increase value congruence, sustainable employability could still be high.
INTRODUCTION
The 2018 Ageing Report (European Commission, 2018) shows that people in Europe become older; while the life expectancy was 67 and 72 for men and women, respectively, in 1960, it has increased for both genders with almost 10 years (77 years for men and 83 years for women). It is expected that EU citizens become even older in the future; the expected life expectancy in 2070 is 86 for men and 90 for women (European Commission, 2018). As people become older, they also must work for a longer period of time. This is reflected in the statutory retirement age, which is increasing for almost all EU countries. For example, the statutory retirement age for the Netherlands in 2016 was 65.5 and is expected to increase to 72.5 in 2070, for both men and women (European Commission, 2018). To be able to work for a longer period, employees need to be physically and mentally healthy. However, the increasing retirement age is accompanied by an increasing percentage of workers experiencing stress. In a recent Gallup study based on nearly 7500 full-time employees, 23% reported feeling burned out at work very often or always (Wigert & Agrawal, 2018). An additional 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes. Taken together, this means that more than two-thirds of full-time employees experience some level of burnout at work. These opposite trends of having to work longer while experiencing health-related obstacles do not support each other. Accordingly, organizations must focus more on their employees’ health, trying to reduce levels of burnout and work-related stress, thereby ensuring that employees are able to work longer (Tauber, Mulder, & Flint, 2018). In other words, organizations need to focus on sustainable employability. The big question is, how can organizations do this?
of burnout. Extending prior research, I will consider employees’ perception of the domain to which behavioral integrity refers to as moral as an important moderator of this relationship. Specifically, while the relation between behavioral integrity and value congruence has been considered straightforward in prior literature (Simons, 2002; Tomlinson, Lewicki, & Ash, 2014), there are plausible reasons to expect that other factors influence the strength of this relationship. Therefore, the present study explores whether the relationship between behavioral integrity and value congruence is stronger when the domain behavioral integrity refers to is seen as having a moral connotation.
Sustainable employability is a very young topic, that has been incorporated in HRM and employability only since the last decade (Ehnert & Wes, 2012; Pfeffer, 2010). Therefore, the present study contributes to the scarce literature by adding new insights concerning organizations’ achievement of sustainable employability. In particular, this research extends existing insights by testing the reported positive effects of behavioral integrity on employees in terms of sustainable employability. Finally, I aim to provide insights into potential boundary conditions of the reported positive association between behavioral integrity and value congruence by examining the topic morality as a moderating factor. This is interesting for organizations, because it highlights the consequences of a moral domain of behavioral integrity for sustainable employability.
THEORY AND HYPOTHESES
Sustainable Employability.
2018) and employees face more stress and burnout (Wigert & Agrawal, 2018), sustainable employability has become even more important.
Sustainable employability is defined as creating an opportunity, in the form of a set of capabilities, for workers to perform work with preservation of good health and well-being in their current and future working life (Van der Klink et al., 2016). Another definition is offered by Van Dam, Van Vuuren and Kemps (2017), who define sustainable employability as the extent to which employees are able and willing to remain working now and in the future. Sustainable employability can be distinguished based on three important factors: employability, work engagement, and affective commitment (Van Dam et al., 2017).
Employability is a form of work specific adaptabilities that enable employees to identify and realize career opportunities, as such it facilitates the movement between jobs within and between organizations (Fugate, Kinicki, & Ashforth, 2004). Employability directly affects the employee’s attractiveness for both the internal and external labor market, and, therefore, is of crucial importance for employees’ sustainable employability (Van Dam et al., 2017).
Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002) defined work engagement as a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Engaged employees have, among other positive outcomes, better health and higher energy levels, which makes work engagement an important indicator of sustainable employability (Van Dam et al., 2017).
Affective commitment is defined as the emotional attachment employees have developed towards an organization (Allen & Meyer, 1990). Affective commitment is considered as an important indicator of sustainable employability (Van Dam et al., 2017) because, employees with high affective commitment are more likely to exert effort on behalf of the organization (Allen & Meyer, 1990), perform at a higher level, avoid being absent and turnover less often than those who are less committed (Tett & Meyer, 1993), and the process of work disengagement that happens when older employees get closer to their retirement age slows down (Damman, Henkens, & Kalmijn, 2013).
employers do to achieve sustainable employability? Behavioral integrity seems relevant for sustainable employability based on the positive outcomes. These positive outcomes and the possible effect of behavioral integrity on sustainable employability is discusses in the next section.
Behavioral Integrity.
Simons (2002) defines behavioral integrity as “the perceived pattern of alignment between an actor’s words and deeds” (p. 19). In other words, behavioral integrity is the match between a manager’s and/or organization’s words and deeds, reflecting the manager/organization acts according to what (s)he/it says. But, according to Davis and Rohtstein (2006), behavioral integrity is not only about what the manager says and does, it is also about the managerial behavior that is supportive of the organization’s mission and value statements, as well as employees’ perception that the manager act in accordance with how a manager “ought” to act. This means that when a manager does not support the organization’s values, but does act in accordance with his ideas, it will not be seen as behaving with integrity, even though there is a word-deed alignment.
Behavioral integrity is a subjectively ascribed trait, because the perceiver’s assessment of a manager’s word-deed alignment determines a manager’s behavioral integrity (Kannan-Narasimhan & Lawrence, 2012; Simons T. , 2002). This means that one can perceive their manager as acting with behavioral integrity, while others might not perceive it as such.
Davis and Rohstein (2006) conducted a meta-analysis to examine the relation between perceived behavioral integrity and employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, satisfaction with the leader and affect towards the organization. They found that when managers act with greater behavioral integrity, employees are more satisfied with their job, with the organization’s leadership, and are more committed to the organization (Davis & Rothstein, 2006). One of the important factors is employees being emotional attached to the organization, meaning they are committed to the organization. Therefore, the positive relation between perceived behavioral integrity and commitment toward the organization, suggest that perceived behavioral integrity would increase affective commitment, and thus sustainable employability increases.
behavioral integrity is related to lower stress and absenteeism, and better health for employees. These results also suggest that perceived behavioral integrity increases employees’ sustainable employability when relating to the definition of sustainable employability by Van der Klink et al. (2016): for workers to perform work with preservation of good health and well-being in their current and future working life.
The concept of trust is often used in studies of behavioral integrity, because trust plays a key role in the relation between behavioral integrity and certain outcomes in hierarchical organizational relationships (Simons T. , 2002; Kannan-Narasimhan & Lawrence, 2012). However, I do believe that not only trust has an important role in the relation between behavioral integrity, but there are also other key concepts. For example, literature has shown that behavioral integrity leads to value congruence, because employees perceive their managers/organizations as sharing the same principles and working for the same objective (Simons, 2002; Tomlinson, Lewicki, & Ash, 2014). This indicates that when managers act in accordance with their principles and objectives, employees perceive their manager’s principles and objectives as matching with their own, and thus higher value congruence is reached.
Previous research of behavioral integrity has shown to positively influence outcomes that can be related to sustainable employability such as lower stress, better health, and organizational commitment. The specific relation between behavioral integrity and sustainable employability is not measured before to my knowledge. It is interesting to look at how the positive outcomes of behavioral integrity relating to sustainable employability can be explained. As mentioned before, previous research found that behavioral integrity leads to value congruence. Therefore, I discuss the concept of value congruence in the next section.
Value Congruence.
perceived value congruence is beneficial for organizations because it is positively related to job satisfaction, organizational identification, and intent to stay in the firm. This is in line with Kristof (1996) outcomes of P-O fit, who argues that P-O fit leads to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, extra-role behaviors, and extensive retention rates.
Literature suggests two types of value congruence, namely the subjective fit, which involves the match between an employee’s own values and his or her perception of the organization’s values (French, Rodgers, & Cobb, 1974; Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005), and objective fit, which compares employees’ values with organizational values as seen by other people, such as managers or coworkers (Edwards & Cable, 2009). The present study focuses on value congruence as the perceived match between the individual’s own values and the organization’ values (Edwards & Cable, 2009). I thus examine subjective fit rather than objective fit.
As previously mentioned, Edwards and Cable (2009) found that perceived value congruence is beneficial for job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is defined as “a pleasurable emotional state associated with one’s job” (Edwards & Cable, 2009: 657). This indicates that employees are happy with their job when job satisfaction is high, which indicates that employees are likely being happy to work. This can be related to the definition of sustainable employability provided by Van Dam et al. (2017): (…) employees are able and willig to remain working now and in the future. Therefore, I expect job satisfaction, and thus value congruence, being associated with greater sustainability. In addition, Siegall and McDonald (2004) suggest that low value congruence is associated with higher levels of burnout, which indicates worse health condition for employees. In turn, high value congruence would be associated with lower levels of burn out, indicating better health conditions. Therefore, it appears plausible to expect that value congruence is positively associated with sustainable employability, because it allows employees to perform work with preservation of good health and well-being (Van der Klink et al., 2016).
Boundary conditions for the effect of behavioral integrity on value congruence.
Every issue can be seen as either moral or pragmatic (Van Bavel, Packer, Haas, & Cunningham, 2012). Gender equality is an interesting context for the present study, one reason for which is that it can be seen both ways (moral and pragmatic). The moral connotation revolves around rules about discrimination on grounds of gender written in the law (e.g. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and its Optional Protocol (United Nations, 2003)), and because “it just is the right thing to do” (Bohnet, 2016). The pragmatic connotation revolves around advancing women’s equality adding $12 trillion to global growth, which is often referred to as “the business case for gender equality” (McKinisey&Company, 2015). I see gender equality as morally connotated for the present study. Another reason that gender equality is an interesting context is because right now, there is substantial word-deed misalignment in that area, as stated by McKinsey & Company (2018) in which they say there are many committed organizations to gender equality, but progress has stalled: this means that behavioral integrity is very low for a lot of companies, making this a very interesting topic to study.
Moral intensity is viewed as a construct that is person specific (Marshall & Dewe, 1997), and, therefore, is best being utilized as a moderating variable (Andrews, Baker, & Hunt, 2011). Previous research did examined the moderated effect of a moral topic on the effect of P-O fit and some of its outcomes. For example, Andrews et al. (2011) studied the effect of P-O fit and job satisfaction and commitment, and whether these outcomes are stronger with higher levels of moral intensity. Their results showed that moral intensity did strengthen the relation between P-O fit outcomes, such as that when moral intensity increases, job satisfaction and commitment became stronger. This shows that a topic that is seen as moral, can strengthen the relation between two constructs. However, previous research did not examined whether a moral topic can increase value congruence. Therefore, the present study examines the moderated effect of a moral topic on the effect of behavioral integrity on value congruence. More specifically, when a manager act in accordance with a topic is morally connotated, it is expected that value congruence becomes higher, compared to when a manager that acts in accordance with a topic that is seen as pragmatic.
The present study.
Hypothesis 1. Perceived behavioral integrity is positively associated with perceived value congruence.
Hypothesis 2. The effect of perceived behavioral integrity on perceived value congruence is stronger the more the goal in question is seen as referring to moral.
Hypothesis 3. Perceived value congruence is associated with greater sustainable employability.
Hypothesis 4. Perceived value congruence mediates the effect of perceived behavioral integrity on sustainable employability.
Hypothesis 5. Perceived value congruence mediates the interactive effect of perceived behavioral integrity and moral goal construal on sustainable employability.
Figure 1 represents the conceptual model to be tested in a survey study. I choose to do a survey study, while most proposed associations are not measured previously, I want to see whether these associations between variables can be observed.
Figure 1 Conceptual model
METHOD
Participants and procedure.
participants could score their managers’ behavioral integrity. By using the forced validation option in Qualtrics, missing data was prevented. To improve the reliability of the questionnaire, a control question was included (“In all honesty, should we use your responses?”). Participants who answered yes were approved and accepted, others were rejected from the study. The questionnaire consisted of general questions (gender, age, amount of years employed in current organization, type of contract (part-time or fulltime), and whether the organization participants worked for was committed to gender equality) and questions assessing the relevant constructs for the present study, namely perceived behavioral integrity, perceived morality of gender equality, perceived value congruence, and sustainable employability. I choose to collect 150 participants for the present study, because the rule of thumb for regression analysis is to use a minimum of 50 participants, but the larger sample sizes increase power and decrease estimation error (Wilson Van Voorhis & Morgan, 2007). By the time I ended data collection, I received 157 responses, and approved all. To give the participants an idea of what the study was about, I asked them to participate in a study to get more insight in the relation between gender equality in organizations and the employability of employees.
Measures.
Perceived behavioral integrity. Perceived behavioral integrity was measured through
the items used by Simons, Friedman, Liu and McLean Parks (2007). Items were adjusted to meet the moral domain: “There is a match between my organization's gender policies and my manager's actions”, “My manager delivers on promises with respect to gender equality”, “My manager practices what (s)he preaches when gender equality is concerned”, “My manager does what (s)he says (s)he will do with respect to gender equality”, “My manager conducts himself/herself by the same values (s)he talks about with respect to gender equality”, “My manager shows the same priorities with respect to gender equality that (s)he describes verbally”, “When my manager promises something with respect to gender equality, I can be certain that it will happen”, and “If my manager says (s)he is going to do something with respect to gender equality, (s)he will”. Items were measured on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α = .96). An average variable was computed using all items.
Topic morality. The study was set against the background of gender equality in the
on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. There was a positive correlation between the two items (r = .73, n = 157, p < .001). Therefore, an average variable was computed using the two items.
Perceived value congruence. Perceived value congruence was measured based on the
measurement scale of P-O fit. I focused on the perceived fit, and, therefore, I adopted the measures of Kristof (1996). The following items were used: “My values, goals, and personality ‘match’ or fit the organization and the current employees in the organization”, “My values and personality support me by fitting in this organization because they are similar to most other employees”, and “The values and ‘personality’ of the organization reflect my own values and personality”. Items were measured on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α = .94). An average variable was computed using all items.
Sustainable employability. Sustainable employability was measured through
employability, work engagement, and affective commitment. A principal components factor analysis with Direct Oblim rotation revealed three factors with an eigenvalue greater than one. Factor one (47.40% explained variance) contained the eight items referring to work engagement (α = .94). Example items are “At work I am bursting with energy” and “My work inspires me”. Factor two (66.26% explained variance) contained the seven items referring to employability (α = .90). Example items are “I could easily get a job like mine” and “My skills are highly sought after at the labor market”. Factor three (71.79% variance explained) contained the five items relating to affective commitment (α = .93). Example items are “I feel emotional attached to this organization” and “I feel a strong sense of belonging to my organization”. I included all items in Appendix A. All items were measured on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. For each factor an average variable was computed containing all relating items.
Control variables. I measured gender, age, organization tenure, type of contract and
1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree (α = .86). An average variable was computed using all items.
Data analysis.
Data was analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 25. A descriptive and correlation analysis were performed for the preliminary analysis. Moderated mediation analysis was performed to test the hypotheses using the Process macro by Hayes (2013), model seven. Z-standardized variables were created and used for the analysis.
RESULTS
Preliminary Analysis.
The descriptive statistics are included in Table 1. The sample consisted of 157 participants, of which 54 were male (34.4%), 101 female (64.3%), and two choose for other (1.3%). The average age was 35 years. Most of the participants worked fulltime (77.1%), with an average of seven years employment in their current organization.
higher than the hypothesized mean. Affective commitment score did not give evidence that the sample mean differs from the hypothesized mean, CI95% (-.13, .22) (t(156) = .49, p = -.626).
The correlation analysis showed a negative relation between age and employability, indicating that the older the employee, the lower his or her self-reported employability was. Furthermore, both organizational tenure and type of contract had a positive relation with work engagement and affective commitment. This indicates that the longer an employee works within an organization and the more hours an employee works, the higher their self-reported work engagement and affective commitment. Another interesting result was the positive relation between organizations’ commitment to gender equality and employability, work engagement and affective commitment, indicating that when organizations commit to gender equality, employees experience higher sustainable employability.
Insert Table 1 here
Main Analysis.
I performed a moderation mediation analysis using the Process macro by Hayes (2013), model seven. I included behavioral integrity as the independent variable, topic morality as moderator, value congruence as mediator, and employability, work engagement and affective commitment as dependent variables. Results of the analysis are displayed in Table 2. My first and second hypotheses stated that perceived behavioral integrity of managers is associated with higher perceived value congruence, and that this association is more pronounced when the topic in question is seen as moral. Results showed a positive significant relation between perceived behavioral integrity and perceived values congruence. Results further showed that the interaction was significant. While the effect of behavioral integrity on value congruence was reliable at all levels of the moderator morality, in line with predictions, the strongest effect was evident when morality was high, CI95% (.21, .59), and the weakest effect when the topic was perceived as less morally connotated, CI95% (.04, .38). Together, these findings support hypotheses one and two.
commitment, CI95% (.19, .54), but not for employability, CI95% (-.19, .20). This partly confirmed my third hypothesis. My fourth hypothesis was about the mediating role of perceived value congruence for the effect of perceived behavioral integrity on sustainable employability. Supporting the proposed mediation, the indirect effect of managers’ perceived behavioral integrity on work engagement, CI95% (.01, .14), and on affective commitment, CI95% (.03, .21) through perceived value congruence were significant. The indirect effect of perceived behavioral integrity on employability was not significant, CI95% (-.07, .08). These results indicate that perceived behavioral integrity did not directly affect sustainable employability, but indirectly did so through increasing perceived value congruence and thereby increasing work engagement and affective commitment, but not employability. This partly confirmed my fourth hypothesis.
Table 2 Moderation-mediation analysis
Mediator model Dependent variable model
Value congruence Employability Work engagement Affective commitment
Intercept -.04 (.06) .00 (.08) .00 (.07) .00 (.07) Organization GE .39** (.08) .21* (.11) .35** (.10) .14 (.10) Gender .07 (.06) -.06 (.08) .06 (.07) .04 (.07) Age -.04 (.07) -.24** (.09) -.05 (.08) -.20** (.08) Organizational tenure .07 (.07) .05 (.09) .13 (.08) .21** (.08) Type of contract .10+ (.06) .10 (.08) .14* (.07) .18** (.07) Behavioral integrity .31** (.08) .13+ (.07) .13 (.10) -.04 (.09) -.02 (.09) Topic morality Interaction .11* (.05) Value congruence .00 (.10) .23** (.09) .36** (.09) R2 .45** .15** .30** .33**
Conditional Indirect Effects
-1 SD (topic morality) .21† (.09) .00 (.03) .05 (.03) .07† (.05) +1 SD (topic morality) .40† (.09) .00 (.05) .09† (.05) .15† (.06)
Notes. N = 157. Values are unstandardized regression coefficients; standard error estimates are in parentheses. +p < .10, *p < .05, **p < .01. Organization GE is organizations’ commitment regarding gender equality. † when 0
My fifth hypothesis was about perceived value congruence that mediates the interactive effect of perceived behavioral integrity and moral domain on sustainable employability. There was no mediation effect of perceived behavioral integrity on employability through perceived value congruence, at none of the levels of morality, low levels of morality, CI95% (-.06, .07), medium levels of morality, CI95% (-.08, .09), and high levels of morality, CI95% (-.09, .11). Moreover, there was no indirect effect of perceived behavioral integrity on work engagement through perceived values congruence at low levels of morality, CI95% (-.00, .13), but there was a reliable indirect effect of perceived behavioral integrity on work engagement through perceived value congruence, at medium levels of morality, CI95% (.01, .17), and high levels of morality, CI95% (.01, .20). Furthermore, there was a reliable indirect effect of perceived behavioral integrity on affective commitment through perceived value congruence, at low levels of morality, CI95% (.00, .18), medium levels of morality, CI95% (.04, .24), and high levels of morality, CI95% (.05, .28). This partly confirmed my fifth hypothesis.
DISCUSSION
Discussion.
The results of my analysis partly support my expectations based on existing literature. I expected for my first hypothesis that perceived behavioral integrity was positively associated with perceived value congruence. My results support this expected relation. This indicates that when employees’ perceive their manager as acting with behavioral integrity, the higher their perceived value congruence is, which means that employees perceive a match between their values and those of the organization they are currently employed (Edwards & Cable, 2009). This outcome is in line with studies by Simons (2002), and Tomlinson et al. (2014), who argued that behavioral integrity leads to value congruence. Tomlinson et al. (2014) argued that when both behavioral integrity and value congruence are high, it indicates a closer emotional bond between managers and employees with mutual emphasis on continued relationship growth, and employees are motivated to behave in a manner that continually and increasingly demonstrates commitment to the relationship. This means that high behavioral integrity and high value congruence strengthens the relation between managers and their employees, which result in more commitment. For practice, this makes it important for organizations to employ managers acting with behavioral integrity, in order to achieve high value congruence.
this interaction, meaning that the strongest effect was shown when levels of morality were high, and the weakest effect when levels of morality were low. This indicates that perceived value congruence becomes even higher when managers act in accordance with a topic that is seen as moral. This gives new insights to literature. While the effect of behavioral integrity on value congruence was already known, the interactive effect of a moral topic has not been measured before to my knowledge. I focused on gender equality as a moral topic. I asked participants if they thought that gender equality was an important moral value for organizations to focus on and if they saw gender equality as a personal moral value of their own, to indicate if they saw gender equality as moral or not. As Rozin (1999) argued, moralization is the process through which preferences are converted into values, for both individual lives and at the level of culture. This means that when a subject is becoming an individual’s own value, that person is likely to see that subject as moral. More specifically, gender equality is seen as moral when gender equality is a personal value of an individual. But it is important to note that everyone has different values and, therefore, not everyone will see gender equality as morally connotated.
value congruence does not relate to external employability, because it does not make the employee more or less attracted to other organizations when the employee feels there is a match between his or her values and those of the organization he or she is currently employed. I would expect that employees who experience high value congruence within their current organization, they are attractive to their current organization compared to employees who experience less value congruence, and, therefore, I would expect their internal employability to be higher. The relation between perceived value congruence and sustainable employability means for practice that organizations can incorporate sustainable employability already in the recruitment process, by hiring applicants who fit with the values of the organization. In this way organizations can ensure higher work engagement and affective commitment, and, thus, greater sustainable employability can be reached.
I expected for my fifth hypothesis that value congruence mediated the interactive effect of behavioral integrity and a moral topic on sustainable employability. My results partly supported this hypothesis. I found that value congruence mediated the interactive effect of behavioral integrity on work engagement at medium and high levels of morality, and on affective commitment at all levels of morality. Interesting is that both the moderation effect and the mediation effect for work engagement was significant, but combining these two analyses, I only found a significant effect at medium and high levels of morality, and not for low levels of morality. This means that there is no evidence that the effect differs at low levels of morality, which indicates that it probably does not matter whether the topic referring to is seen as less moral for work engagement.
managers/organizations as sharing the same principles and working for the same objective (Simons, 2002; Tomlinson, Lewicki, & Ash, 2014). Although this is interesting because value congruence was not significant related to employability, as where the organizations’ commitment to gender equality was significant to employability.
Limitations and future research.
As I previous mentioned, some respondents commented at the end of the questionnaire that they were not necessarily aware of organizational policies relating gender equality, because it is not a topic discussed daily. This could influence the outcomes regarding perceived behavioral integrity, because these statements were based on the managers acting in accordance with their thoughts or policies of gender equality. The aim of this study was to test whether a moral domain could influence the proposed effect, but it could be that when perceived behavioral integrity was measured in general the results were different. Therefore, future research should test whether perceived behavioral integrity in general has an effect on employees’ sustainable employability.
For my fifth hypothesis I did not found evidence for de mediated role of value congruence on the effect of behavioral integrity on work engagement at low levels of morality. One possible explanation is that I do not have enough power to confirm this relation. While the rule of thumb is no less than 50 participants for a regression analysis (Wilson Van Voorhis & Morgan, 2007), there are many studies who use different calculations of the needed sample size. For example, Cohen and Cohen (1975) show that with a single predictor, 124 participants are needed to maintain 80% power, and with five predictors, 187 participants are needed to maintain 80% power. In this study, I used three predictors. Therefore, according to Cohen and Cohen (1975), I should have used at least 162 participants in order to maintain 80% power.
I choose to do a survey study, because most concepts were not tested in previous studies. In that way, I was able to observe the proposed associations, but I cannot draw any causality from my results. Therefore, it is interesting for future research to manipulate behavioral integrity and value congruence in experimental research to show causality between the variables.
Conclusion.
integrity, but when organizations are able to increase value congruence, sustainable employability can still be obtained. This study shows that not only tools supporting employees’ health can increase sustainable employability, but also perceived value congruence have an impact on employees’ sustainable employability. Furthermore, sustainable employability can even be greater when managers act in accordance with a moral topic. Given these outcomes, it is important for organizations to encourage managers to act with behavioral integrity, and to act in accordance with moral topics, to obtain value congruence, which in turn, affects employees’ sustainable employability.
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APPENDIX A
Items sustainable employability
Employability
- I could easily get a new job like mine
- I could get another, similar job without much problems - My skills are highly sought after at the labor market
- I have an extensive network that I can deploy to find a similar or better job - There are several places where I could get e new job
- Owing to my personal qualities, I can get a new job easily - There is much demand for my professional expertise Work engagement
- At work I am bursting with energy - I feel fit and strong while working - My work inspires me
- When I get up in the morning, I feel like working - When I am working very intensively, I feel happy - I am proud of the work I do
- I get entranced in my job
- My work gives me a feeling of intense joy Affective commitment
- I really feel as if this organization’s problems are my own - I feel emotionally attached to this organization
- This organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me - I feel a strong sense of belonging to my organization
Table 1 Descriptive statistics
Notes. N = 157. +p < .10, *p < .05, **p < .01. Organization GE = organization’s commitment regarding gender equality. Gender: 1 = male, 2 = female, 3 = other. Type of contract: 1 = part-time, 2 = fulltime.
