Perceived organizational support (POS) is when employees feel their company cares about them and can be trusted, leading to improved wages, benefits, and work conditions. Organizational identification is key, with supervisors playing a crucial role in fostering feelings of support. Businesses must make decisions with POS in mind to reap the benefits of improved work ethic and loyalty.
Perceived organizational support (POS) is a work environment that fosters a feeling in workers that their company or institution cares about them and that they can be trusted. When perceived organizational support is in place, the benefits for employer and employee are mutual. Employees benefit from perceived organizational support by receiving improved wages and benefits for hard work, enjoying supervisor support with job issues and working conditions, and feeling that their work is meaningful and useful to the company. The benefits of POS to the business is that it produces hard working employees who are willing to make sacrifices for the business and will push to improve the business and reduce absenteeism and apathy.
The key to POS is organizational identification, or conformity between company values and employee values. To begin with, a company must have and show great respect for the employee by taking care of his physical and emotional needs. When this is done, it will in turn foster feelings of high esteem in the workers for the company or institution, creating an overall congruence of values.
The POS is mostly in the hands of worker supervisors. Employees often assign human-like qualities to the companies or institutions they work for, and these qualities are often related to how they are treated by their supervisors. When an employee is praised, rewarded and supported, organizational support is perceived and the employee typically praises and rewards the company for working hard. Conversely, when a supervisor is derogatory or doesn’t address problems or complaints, the employee feels that the company doesn’t care or doesn’t value them. Skills for building and enhancing perceived organizational support need to be taught to supervisors.
The idea of POS seems simple enough, but this idea can become complicated and difficult to implement unless a business makes business decisions with POS in mind. For example, well-paid workers with excellent benefits who have had to fight for those rewards, either personally or through a union, will not necessarily have received organizational support once they got the best wages and benefits. These workers can actually feel undervalued by the struggle. In this case, the company has succumbed to the high demands but has lost the benefits it could have reaped from positive organizational support.
POS is growing in popularity as its value in the workplace is being recognized. Many point-of-sale studies have found that perceived organizational support improves an employee’s work ethic and loyalty to the company, as well as reducing absenteeism. Making and keeping workers happy is apparently good for business.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
