The moderating effects of polychronicity and achievement striving on the relationship between task variety and organization-based self-esteem of mid-level managers in China

Employees’ organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), defined as ‘the degree to which an individual believes him/herself to be capable, significant, and worthy as an organizational member’ (Pierce and Gardner, 2004: 593), can be increased by giving them tasks that fit their dispositions. The primary purpose of our study is to examine combinations, instead of individual dispositions separately, on OBSE. Specifically, to increase OBSE, we propose that giving employees who prefer to handle multiple tasks simultaneously (people who are polychronic) more task variety. This effect will be stronger for employees with high motivation to achieve (achievement striving). The hypotheses were tested using data collected from 260 middle managers and their immediate supervisors in three Chinese organizations. We found that offering more task variety to polychronic employees with high levels of achievement striving resulted in the highest levels of OBSE.