A “Human Growth” Perspective on Organizational Resources and Firm Performance

We define immaterial satisfaction as the degree of wellbeing that workers derive from creativity, autonomy, and personal growth, overall self-fulfillment. These are dimensions of satisfaction that we relate, from American pragmatism, to the use of creative intelligence. The paper deals with the mediating role of immaterial satisfaction between organizational processes (defined by teamwork, on-the-job autonomy and involvement) and organizational performance (defined in terms of improvements in product quality and innovation). We address this relationship in the Italian social service sector. To this end, we implement a structural equation model including both observed and latent variables using a survey dataset that concerns 4134 workers and 320 not-for-profit social cooperatives. The analysis of direct, indirect and total effects in the structural model shows that autonomous innovation positively influences performance. It also shows that impact immaterial satisfaction adds to the impact of worker involvement in making involvement bear positively on performance, while it also reduces the negative impact of task-autonomy. Common method bias is controlled for by resorting to post-hoc testing and by introducing three distal sources of subjective data from directors, managers and paid workers.