Effects of Institutional Factors and Leadership Structures on Workplace Norms and Employees’ Work Attitude in Japan

Recent research in cultural psychology has shown that the emotions, cognitions, and actions of individuals and groups are shaped in part by physical, societal, and interpersonal environments. Typically, Gelfand et al. (2011) illustrated that “tightness-looseness” of social norms is afforded by various ecological and human-made environmental factors, along with everyday situations and psychological processes.

The present research aims to apply the socio-ecological perspective to organizational psychology and to figure out the dynamic relationship between institutional factors, leadership structures, employees’ work motivation, and their perception of group norms among workers.

We conducted an online survey of 600 permanent employees working for diverse organizations in Japan, which differed in many aspects such as industry, number of employees, average length of service of employees, frequency of job rotation, and recent corporate performance. The questionnaire consisted of several scales to measure respondents’ work attitude and behavior, perceived leadership qualities of their leaders, and perceived tightness of implicit norms in workplace. To figure out a whole picture of leadership structures in workplace, we asked respondents to evaluate leadership qualities of a boss (formal leader) and an influential colleague (informal leader), respectively.

As a result, various institutional factors, leadership structures (i.e., combinations of performance/maintenance leadership qualities of formal and Informal leaders), and employees’ work motivation mutually interacted in diverse ways. The perceived tightness of workplace norms was also affected by the leadership structures and some institutional factors such as job rotation frequency. The results suggest that the desirable leadership structure varies depending on social environmental factors of workplace, and that informal leadership plays a considerable role on employees’ motivation and perception of norms.