Discussion
Implications
This study found that job demands were negatively associated with organizational commitment, which in turn was negatively related to job search behavior. Organizational commitment mediated the relationship between job demands and job search behavior in the total sample. The findings of this study revealed that worker cooperatives moderated the relationship between job demands and organizational commitment. These findings indicate that worker cooperatives alleviated the deleterious relationships of job demands with organizational commitment and job search behavior. It seems that worker cooperatives play a moderating role, as this study assumes, because their members are provided with a variety of resources, such as autonomy, organizational support, decision-making participation, and social support.
This study offers a number of implications for research about the JDR model and worker cooperatives. First, most - if not all- previous studies in the OB and HRM fields have examined the influences of job demands and job resources on employee well-being and attitudes only in capitalist firms. On the other hand, this study provides evidence that the detrimental influence of job demands may be relieved or even disappear in worker cooperatives. In other words, while the negative relationship between job demands and organizational commitment was confirmed in capitalist firms as the JDR model proposes, this relationship was not preserved in worker cooperatives. Thus, the findings of this study imply that the relationships confirmed in previous studies of the OB and HRM fields may be altered by worker cooperatives.
