Social Exchanges in the Workplace
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1471903042000339392
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Our economy is imbalanced for the past centuries. Corporations, employers, and CEOs hold too much power despite the factor that there is a higher number of workers. But social exchanges are important because they definitely account for workers’ performance and organization’s success. The social exchange theory plays a big role between management and workers which affect their commitment, motivation, and desire to remain working. Management is found to be a crucial part in social exchange processes. These social exchanges affect the overall success of the organization and working environment. For example, if management decisions are perceived positively by employees, the result would be good attitudes and behaviors from the employees which is very valuable to the organization. Social exchange in the work place is like a long-term exchange of favors and obligations between the workers and management. This is because a worker doesn’t just have a relationship with an individual representing the organization, but the overall organization. Trust is also a problem in social exchange, specifically in the process of employees receiving a favor and expecting a repaying of it. However, economic social exchanges don’t have this problem because failure of agreement can be solved through legal actions.
This paper uses the social exchange theory to predict the outcomes of different management practices on public sector workers. A postal survey was used to collect empirical data from public sector workers. A total of 320 questionnaires were distributed to workers, supervisors, and managers in the departments of community service, education, engineering, social service, and environmental service. A total of 206 surveys were returned. Following this, a small number of individual and group interviews were conducted in order to better understand the results. The results found 58% of variation in employee commitment, 53% of variation in motivation, and 41% in respondents’ desire to remain with the organization.The results found that engagement was encouraged where workers felts powerful that they were able to use their personal judgement and make decisions. It found weak trust between management and workers. Most workers felt committed to their department which can be explained because of their matching skills. There were also indications that workers experience pressure at work due to heavy workload and under staffing which explains why workers are motivated to work.
The social exchange theory recommends that workers’ commitments remunerate in manners that are seen as reasonable with a resulting outcome that is equivalent with such trades. The outcomes from the study were steady with the social exchange theory, supporting the suggestion that positive social exchanges/relationships bring equal trade between two individuals. For instance, trust between workers is important because it can anticipate change in workers’ responsibility, inspiration, and desire to stay where they are. With team-engagement, employee involvement, and empowerment in workers created by these social exchanges, create fair rewards, job security, and positive significant effects on workers’ motivation. For instance, giving workers a sense of empowerment like the ability to make decisions with a degree of freedom increases their motivational level. Team work also increases their motivation by creating competition and increasing self-confidence with the aid of social support in the workplace. Workers would also feel less motivated if the organization fail to provide them with security. This shows that it’s very important for both workers and management to initiate social exchanges. Managements need to exchange these features in for profits or success. However, I notice that contradictions exist between management practices in the social exchanges. For example, the survey found overall high commitment HRM practices, but weak trust between managers and workers. This suggests that management doesn’t initiate social exchanges with workers as much and effectively as they should. Trust is very important in any social exchange because if there’s weak trust, no agreement would be made which could be pretty bad for both parties.