In the 2017 research report, we presented statistical analyses of working conditions and multi-level relationships in Chinese organizations based on large-scale survey data; on this basis, the findings of our working conditions research are summarized as follows.

1. We argue that the quality of working conditions in an organization can be gauged from three differentiated yet interconnected dimensions: the conditions of organizational institutions, the objective working conditions and the subjective psychological conditions.

The connective mechanism among these dimensions is manifested by the fact that the normative institutions of an organization work to regulate the overall behaviors of participants, shape the patterns and orders of power and interactive relations between members, and determine the material conditions and time arrangement at work. Equitable normative institutions well-adjusted to human nature result in high-quality objective working conditions; to the contrary, organizational institutional conditions that are highly deviated from the prevalent political and legal institutions, cultural expectations and dominant conceptual institutions at the macroscopic level naturally lead to deterioration and thus low quality of objective working conditions, or even no quality to speak of.

2. Organizational institutional conditions not only directly affect the quality of working conditions, but they also act simultaneously with objective working conditions to exert an effect on subjective psychological conditions.

The more reasonably organized institutions are, the higher the quality of its objective working conditions, which means such institutional and working conditions are better aligned with workers’ psychological expectations and more conducive to people’s physical and mental health, as well as to the promotion of their all-round development, ultimately leading to more positive emotional responses. The opposite is also true: unreasonable, unjust institutional norms cause a failure of objective working conditions to meet people’s material, interactive and spiritual needs, resulting in, naturally, negative psychological experiences and an adverse impact on their work behaviors. Our research finds that organizational units frequently mandate that employees work more than 8 hours on a daily basis and make working extended hours a routine. This undoubtedly reduces work time quality, which in turn aggravates the sense of job burnout and increases their work-family conflict, leading to negativity and a sense of frustration in terms of their psychological conditions. Our analysis of data on work time quality has validated the indisputable existence of such a cause-effect chain, and all regression coefficients are found to be positive and statistically significant. Further research found that work time quality is significantly negatively correlated with the two major subjective psychological variables - job burnout and work-family conflict, that is, the higher the quality of work time, the lower an employee's job burnout and work-family conflict.

3. Organizational institutional conditions and objective working conditions motivate organizational members’ behaviors and exert an effect on the efficiency of an entire organization via people’s subjective psychological conditions.

The results of PLS-SEM analysis pertaining to the working conditions research framework inform us that in an organization's working conditions, the work time quality that is simultaneously determined by the formal and substantive quality of work time not only directly motivates people's work behaviors and organizational identification, but also motivate and promote psychological constructs such as work engagement and organizational identification by reducing subjective perceptions of job burnout and work-family conflict. Our research indicates that with a poor work time quality and a low time use efficiency, organizational members tend to be subjected to an excessively overburdened, perfunctory and sluggish state over a long term during their practices of their roles. This can easily lead to adverse emotional experiences like physical and mental strain and exhaustion, an inability to adequately deal with the relationship between the roles that employees assume within and without an organization (e.g., the relationship between work and family life), and a division in their role behaviors that results in psychological contradiction and strain. From the perspective of work time, such an intense feeling of job burnout and role conflict reflects not only poor working conditions but also the key areas that should be focused upon by organizational governance.

4. The results of PLS-SEM analysis pertaining to our working conditions research framework also show that within an organization's working conditions, the quality of physical conditions and that of welfare facilities jointly determine the level of the level of objective workplaces, and they both exert positive, significant and valid influences on the quality of objective workplaces.

Notably, evaluation results on objective workplaces further associate itself, in a significant manner, with organizational identification and work enthusiasm to work as a mediator between the objective workplace quality and its outcome variables, playing the role of a bridge or tie. Thus, the improvement and construction of material conditions at workplaces should not be neglected in organizational governance. Eliminating hazardous factors in physical working conditions and improving welfare service facilities that are conducive to workers’ physical and mental health can also increase the overall governance outcome within an organization.

5. Performance-based pay, fair exchange and effort-reward balance are all basic rights that should be enjoyed by every worker in an organizational unit, basic components for building good working conditions, and undoubtedly, a very important perspective from which organizational working conditions are analyzed and assessed.

By statically analyzing our survey data, the inner structure and measurement validity of the effort and reward scales that we complied were well supported by empirical data. More importantly, the effort-reward imbalance ratio, an indicator jointly determined by the effort and reward scales, indicates that about 92% of workers more or less have their work efforts exceeding their rewards, a finding consistent with the result of our survey research. This indicates that the indicator can more accurately and effectively reflect the quality of working conditions within an organization compared with the effort or reward scale.

As a core component in the category of objective working conditions, effort-reward imbalance exerts a substantially damaging effect on the governance of organizational working conditions. That is because it directly causes such adverse psychological consequences as stress, resentment, dissatisfaction and grievance - group sentiments that are linked to unfairness and unreasonableness. Without a proper outlet, these sentiments may directly lead to power conflicts and even disintegration of an organization. Our empirical research indicates that the more severe the effort-reward imbalance, the more intense the three adverse psychological consequences - dissatisfaction, status inconsistency and relative deprivation - it causes among people, with the pathway coefficient being extremely statistically significant; in the meantime, such an objective variable and the three related variables are all significantly negatively correlated with organizational psychological identification, that is, they all have an undermining effect on organizational integration and solidarity.

6. The mechanism allowing organizational members to identify themselves with the organization and engage themselves in work roles is the institutional arrangements of the organization, which facilitate them to participate in a variety of work-related affairs.

Looking at organizational working conditions from the perspective of employee participation means treating workers as the true “owners” of an organization. Through their active participatory behaviors, workers are allowed to experience a sense of “ownership”, which in turn reduces the employer-employee gap and arouses members’ enthusiasm and motivation. Statistical analysis of data shows that allocative, expressive, decision-making and informal participations jointly constitute an organization's objective employee participation conditions, with the first three exerting a positively promotive effect on objective employee participation and the informal participation an undermining effect on the participatory quality. The implication of these effects is that to improve the quality of working conditions from the aspect of employee participation, emphasis should be given to providing employees with more opportunities to voice their opinions to the upper level, constructing and maintaining a variety of institutionalized channels for thought expression and information conveyance, and “delegating” workers with more discretionary power to decide upon their work. Al these are effective governance measures in an increasingly flattened organizational structure.

Our research finds that from the objective employee participation to the fulfillment of social solidarity within organizations, the direct causal mechanisms are indeed playing a significant role, and a complex array of causal mechanism chains encompassing a series of subjective psychological factors are undeniably present. It is through these direct and indirect connection mechanisms that the objective employee participatory behaviors are able to facilitate the solidarity and integration of an organization. Data shows that the higher the quality of objective employee participation, the higher employees’ sense of occupational accomplishment and social value, the higher the satisfaction towards work and the lower the tendency to seek non-institutionalized right protection. In the same vein, the higher the occupational social value felt by workers, the higher the work satisfaction, the lower the tendency to seek non-institutional work protection, the stronger workers’ identification with or reliance upon their organizations, and the greater vitality of the entire organization. As can be seen from these findings, the key to organizational governance amid the high-quality development phase is to improve and implement institutions pertaining to employees’ work participation, further upgrade employees’ participation within organizations, coordinate with the social relationship and close the gap between decision makers and employees, and create a true milieu featuring a sense of “ownership” where “an organization is seen as a family and its development is reliant upon everyone’s effort” through “participatory management” concerning every stakeholder, so as to achieve a state of joint participation, effort and sharing among all organizational members. Thus, when employees actively participate in organizational affairs, treating them as matters concerning their own interests, and consciously identify themselves with, and devote to, their organizations, the organizational working conditions will naturally be optimized and the quality of working conditions will inevitably be improved.