Is the Employee-Organization Relationship Dying? Long-Term Perceived Organizational Support Trends

Increasing wage disparity and job insecurity over recent decades have been argued to greatly weaken employees’ social exchange relationship with the organization (SER) which is being replaced by more transactional relationships between workers and employers. An alternative view holds that SER continues to be important for meeting the needs and goals of employees and organizations. A critical element of SER involves perceived organizational support (POS), which refers to employees’ belief that the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. We carried out a temporal meta-analysis with 278 samples of U. S. employees, including 112,057 individuals, to examine how POS and its relationships with important antecedents and consequences have changed in strength over the last quarter century. We found that POS increased steadily over this time period. Further, concerning the two major antecedents of POS that we examined, LMX’s relationship with POS has increased, and the association o...