The perceived effectiveness of democratic management, job performance, and citizenship behavior: evidence from a large Chinese state-owned petrochemical company

Abstract

Democratic management, a unique union-based form of employee participation in China, is seldom studied in the employee participation literature. This paper investigates the associations between employees’ perceived democratic management effectiveness, employee job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), using 988 matching surveys of both workers and their supervisors in a state-owned petrochemical firm from the central region of China. We find that our measure of an employee’s perception of democratic management effectiveness is positively associated with an employee’s job performance and organizational citizenship behavior. However, the association between perceived democratic management effectiveness and employee performance is negative if the employee is a dispatch worker. Our interpretation of the findings suggests that an employee’s perception of democratic management effectiveness is a source of employee performance.