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PurposeThis research aims to identify trajectories of employees' perceptions of organizational support (POS) over the course of an eight-month period and to document associations between these longitudinal trajectories and several outcomes related to employees' well-being (i.e. job satisfaction), attitudes (i.e. turnover intentions, affective commitment) and behaviors (i.e. voice behaviors).Design/methodology/approachPOS ratings provided each four months by a sample of 747 employees were analyzed using person-centered growth mixture analyses.FindingsResults revealed that longitudinal heterogeneity in POS trajectories was best captured by the identification of four distinct profiles of employees. Two of these profiles followed stable high (67.2%) and low (27.3%) POS trajectories, whereas the remaining profiles were characterized by increasing (2.2%) or decreasing (3.3%) POS trajectories. Our results showed that, by the end of the follow-up period, the most desirable outcome levels were associated, in order, with the increasing, high, low and decreasing trajectories.Practical implicationsThis research has important implications by showing that perceptions of organizational support fluctuate over time for some employees and help better predicting valuable work-related outcomes.Originality/valueThese findings shed a new perspective on organizational support theory by adopting a dynamic perspective, and revealing that changes over time in POS are more potent predictors of valuable work-related outcomes than stable POS levels.

Self-determination theory proposes that individuals experience distinct types of motivation to varying degrees. While it is well documented that these types of motivation differentially predict outcomes, very little attention has been paid to how they interact within individuals. The current study addresses the simultaneous occurrence of multiple motivation types within individual workers by adopting a person-centered approach on two samples of employees from different countries (n = 723 & 286). Four very similar motivation profiles were found across samples, representing balanced motivation, amotivated, autonomously regulated and highly motivated employees. In Sample 1, governmental employees presented a greater likelihood of membership in the least desirable amotivated profile. In Sample 2, autonomously and highly motivated profiles showed superior work performance and higher levels of wellbeing, while the amotivated profile fared the worst. The presence of external regulation in a profile appears unimportant when combined with autonomous forms of motivation, and detrimental to outcomes in the absence of autonomous forms of motivation. These results support the hypothesis that autonomous forms of motivation are far more important in promoting positive workplace outcomes than more controlling forms.

Despite the increased popularity of person-centered analyses, no comprehensive approach exists to guide the systematic investigation of the similarity (or generalizability) of latent profiles, their predictors, and their outcomes across subgroups of participants or time points. We propose a six-step process to assess configural (number of profiles), structural (within-profile means), dispersion (within-profile variability), distributional (size of the profiles), predictive (relations between predictors and profile membership), and explanatory (relations between profile membership and outcomes) similarity. We then apply this approach to data on organizational commitment mindsets collected in North America (n = 492) and France (n = 476). This approach provides a rigorous method to systematically and quantitatively assess the extent to which a latent profile solution generalizes across diverse samples, such as in the cross-national comparison in our illustrative example, or the extent to which interventions or naturalistic changes may impact the nature of a latent profile solution. This approach also helps to identify the nature of any differences that might be present, thus providing richer interpretations of observed differences and ideas for future research.

This research relies on a combination of variable- and person-centered approaches to help improve our understanding of the dimensionality of the workaholism construct. Our results showed that employees' workaholism ratings simultaneously reflected a global overarching construct co-existing with four specific dimensions (behavioral, motivational, emotional, and cognitive workaholism) among a sample of 432 workers who completed a questionnaire twice over a three-month period. We also examined the profiles taken by workaholism dimensions, and documented their stability over time as well as the associations between these profiles and theoretically-relevant predictors and outcomes. Furthermore, we examined whether these associations differ as a function of working remotely or onsite. Four profiles were identified and found to be highly stable over time: Unplugged, Plugged In, Moderately Unplugged with Externalized Workaholism, and Moderately Unplugged with Cognitive Workaholism. Personal life orientation, telepressure, and interpersonal norms regarding work-related messages were related to the likelihood of profile membership. Remote working also reinforced the positive effects of personal life orientation and the negative effects of interpersonal norms regarding work-related messages. Finally, employees' work-to-family guilt, job satisfaction, family satisfaction, and life satisfaction also differed as a function of their profile.