The Relationship Among the Autonomous Orientation, Job Characteristics, and Work Performance of People's Conciliators: Mixed Research Based on a Person-environment Matching Perspective

Based on self-determination theory, job characteristics model theory, and person-environment fit theory, this article looks at the autonomous orientation and job characteristics as the starting points to understand the path to improve the work performance of people's conciliators. It puts forward a logical chain of “autonomous orientation and job characteristics matching performance”. Further, based on in-depth interviews and two-stage data of 584 grassroots mediators, this article draws the following conclusions: First, autonomous orientations and job characteristics may improve the work performance of people's conciliators. Controlled orientations and impersonal orientations have no significant effect on performance. Second, high autonomous orientations and high job characteristics matching have a stronger effect in promoting performance. However, controlled orientations, impersonal orientations, and job characteristics matching have no significant effects on performance. To improve the incentive mechanism of grassroots people's conciliatory work and to make full use of job design matching the personality traits of mediators to improve their motivation and work performance, this study has important practical implications to promote people's conciliatory work that better serves grassroots governance This study also has theoretical implications. First, the article considers how to improve the work performance of people's conciliators from the perspective of person-environment matching, combining the dual dimensions of “people”(autonomous orientation) and “object”(job characteristics). It compensates for the deficiency in previous studies that tend to examine how to motivate the work performance of people conciliators from the “single object” perspective of system, environment, etc. The results of this article also respond to the call of current scholars to strengthen the work of people's conciliators as the key subject of mediation activities so as to promote the effectiveness of the people's mediation system. Second, this article expands our understanding of person-environment matching theory in the practice of people's mediation in China. The theory suggests that a mismatch between the individual and the environment will lead to stress, thereby negatively affecting work performance. However, this study finds that a controlled orientation/impersonal orientation, and matching with job characteristics, has no significant impact on performance. This indicates that in the practice of people's mediation in China, even if conciliators do not have autonomous personal characteristics due to the influence of China's problem-oriented governance strategy and the constraints of the conciliators' job responsibilities, they still must complete settling-dispute mediation work, but their performance is obviously inferior to that of conciliators with autonomous orientations. Finally, this article enriches the measurement methods of person-environment matching and provides new empirical ideas for related research. In this study, the autonomous orientation and job characteristics are respectively measured, and then the method of polynomial response surface analysis is used to calculate the matching value between individuals and the environment ion order to objectively and accurately predict their degree of matching.