Testing the Role of Participative Decision-Making on Job Engagement via Perceived Job Meaningfulness: The Moderated Mediating Effect of Self-Regulated Learning

Improving effective participatory decision-making is important in organizational innovation and development, and is especially a lubricant in securing competitive advantage within Chinese small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs). For Chinese SMEs respecting the values of the organization’s members and the traditional culture of the Chinese society, as well as participatory decision-making is practiced to facilitate organizational outcome. Based on this background, this study focused on presenting and verifying a research model that participatory decision-making increases job engagement via perceived job meaningfulness and verified the moderated mediation effect of self-regulated learning. In order to verify research hypotheses, we collected data from 364 employees from Chinese SMEs. According to the results of empirical analysis, it was found that participative decision-making had a positive influence on perceived job meaningfulness and job engagement. In addition, perceived job meaningfulness had a positive influence on job engagement. Furthermore, perceived job meaningfulness significantly mediated the relationship between participatory decision-making and job engagement. The self-regulated learning positively moderated the relationship between participative decision-making and perceived job meaningfulness. It indicated that participative decision-making leads to higher level of perceived job meaningfulness when organizational member’s recognition of their self-regulated learning increased. Finally, self-regulated learning moderated the mediating effect of perceived job meaningfulness on the relationship between participative decision-making and job engagement. Based on these results, this study proposes methods to improve job engagement, validates the related research model, and suggests that future research directions for enhancing organizational members’ job engagement. Overall, this study contributes to expanding the field of research on participative decision-making through its role and impact in the field of SMEs in the Chinese organizational context.