Document Type : Original Article
Author
Associate Professor, HR Management, Faculty of Humanities, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran.
Abstract
Purpose: Intimacy means to share inner wishes and to show sympathy for others. Organizational intimacy makes efficient management and motivated employees and finally leads to organizational progress and prosperity. Those employees who accept their job and are satisfied with it show intimacy with co-workers and can build a space for different groups to feel accepted and supported, and to be able to cooperate. In establishing organizational intimacy career fitness emphasizes the role of psychological factors such as empowerment. Therefore, intimacy within an organization not only reflects career fitness and people persistence factors in their job but also other aspects such as employees’ psychological empowerment are involved which have been unnoticed in previous studies. Moreover, studies on career fitness and organizational intimacy mostly agree on the necessity of further research in this regard. About existing evidence and experience during recent years, the importance of employees’ career fitness within public organizations and considering career fitness as an effective factor in organizational intimacy while respecting the mediative role of psychological empowerment have not been studied. In this regard, the present study has been carried out with the aim of mediative role of psychological empowerment in relation between career fitness and organizational intimacy.
Design/Methodology/Approach: The present study is an applied descriptive survey in terms of its purpose and implementation method. The population of the study consisted of 35875 employees working in Ilan public organizations among which 380 were selected as sample size using Cochran’s formula. A questionnaire was applied to collect data and evaluate the relation between various variables. To evaluate the variable of career fitness, two dimensions of organizational fitness and society fitness were extracted from the questionnaire by Adams et al. (2010), and also five dimensions of competence, autonomy, influence, significance, and trust were obtained from the questionnaire by Spreitzer (1995) and Mishra (1997) to evaluate psychological empowerment, three dimensions of organizational climate, organizational understanding and amity were extracted to evaluate organizational intimacy through the questionnaire by Ebrahimzadeh (2019). To ensure the reliability of research constructs, the Alpha Cronbach way was applied. The value of the Alpha Cronbach coefficient was more than 0.7 indicating appropriate reliability of research constructs. Kolmogorov Smirnov test was used to examine normality and non-normality of data at a significance level of 5%. Since the obtained significance level was less than 5%, the data was not normal. To evaluate the validity of constructs, structural equations way was applied in SmartPLS that obtained figures out of which were less than 0.5 hence research constructs had appropriate validity.
Findings: To examine model fitness, the GOF index was applied during this study. The value of GOF was 0.8251 indicating very suitable fitness of the model. Some coefficients were obtained in testing research hypotheses using Structural equations in SmartPLS which all were significant because the value of their significance test was more than 1.96. Therefore, all of the hypotheses of the study were confirmed. Moreover, as the mediative variable of Psychological Empowerment existed in this study, the Sobel test was applied. The value of the Z-value obtained by the Sobel test was 9.71 which was more than 1.96. Therefore, it can be stated that the mediative impact of Psychological Empowerment on the relation between career fitness and organizational intimacy was significant at a confidence level of 95 percent.
Discussion and Conclusions: Results of this study showed that career fitness has a positive significant impact on organizational intimacy and also psychological empowerment plays a mediative role in the relationship between career fitness and organizational intimacy. The obtained results through this study correlated to findings by Yoon et al. (2022), Hum et al. (2024), Valizadeh Zanouz and Moghtaderzadeh Maleki Moghadam (2016), and Faraz et al. (2023). Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen career fitness and Employees’ psychological empowerment at all aspects to take advantage of organizational intimacy benefits. Employees with suitable career fitness usually develop the benefits of their organizations, accept group goals by focus and awareness and concentrating on them, motivate others, and make the ground for their organization which leads to organizational intimacy. Also, one of the logical and efficient ways to promote organizational intimacy is to proper implementation of empowerment among employees which would have a positive impact on performance and productivity.
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