Perceived Organizational Support: A Literature Review

Abstract

Perceived organizational support (POS), which reflects the organization’s value on employees’ contributions and concern for employee benefits, is an important tool to help organizations establish favourable relationship with employees and motivate employees work hard. This paper aims to make a review of POS concept and the variables related to POS. Research results showed that perceived organizational support emphasizes organizational commitment to employees and is a unilateral relationship. Perceived organizational support is related to employees’ reduced absenteeism, increased job satisfaction, happiness, organizational citizenship behaviour and organizational performance, and also influenced by organizational fairness, working conditions, HR practices, employee characteristics, leadership, management communication. Besides, this paper summarized the measures to improve perceived organizational support, such as supportive or high commitment HR practices, fairness, superior and co-worker supports, employee empowerment. This study helps researchers understand the latest research progress in perceived organizational support.