RESEARCH ARTICLE
Overtime work as the antecedent of employee satisfaction, firm productivity, and innovation
Young Jin Ko,
Jin Nam Choi,
Young Jin Ko
College of Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Jin Nam Choi
College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
Correspondence
Jin Nam Choi, College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, South Korea.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this author
Young Jin Ko,
Jin Nam Choi,
Young Jin Ko
College of Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Jin Nam Choi
College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
Correspondence
Jin Nam Choi, College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, South Korea.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorSummary
Overtime work has been blamed for the deterioration of employee satisfaction and productivity. However, the organization-level implications of overtime work as a normative expectation remain unclear. In this study, such effects were analyzed through human capital theory and a causal attribution approach. Various organizational outcomes and boundary conditions were explored in explaining these implications. The analysis of time lagged data from 273 firms affirmed that a firm's overtime level was related negatively to employee satisfaction. However, it was positively related to the firm's productivity and curvilinearly (inverted U-shaped) related to innovation. The effects of the firm's overtime level on firm productivity and innovation were also moderated by organizational trust. This study highlights the costs and benefits of overtime work as tools for utilizing human capital and reveals the critical contingency of organizational trust that enables firms to attenuate the costs of the overtime level and accentuate its potential benefits.
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