Not All I-Deals Are Same: Examining a Process Model Linking Content-Specific I-Deals to Employee Performance Outcomes

Integrating i-deals theory and job demands and resources (JD-R) theory, I propose to investigate whether and how content-specific i-deals differ in their effectiveness in individual performance outcomes. Consistent with the early conceptualization of i-deals contents, I specifically compare the impact of task and work responsibility, financial incentives, schedule flexibility, and location flexibility on employees’ engagement and performance outcomes. I suggest that content-specific i-deals have different relationships with physical-, emotional-, and cognitive-engagement, and the three types of engagement mediate the relationships between content-specific i-deals and performance outcomes (operationalized as task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and creativity). Multilevel modeling and relative weights analysis of the data from 276 employees nested in 38 workgroups showed that, of the four contents of i-deals, i-deals pertaining to task and work responsibility demonstrated the highest relative importance in terms of predicting emotional engagement, financial incentives were the most relevant to physical engagement, and schedule flexibility accounted for more variance explained in cognitive engagement. Moreover, mediation analyses demonstrated that physical engagement fully accounted for the relationship between financial incentives i-deals and task performance, and emotional engagement fully accounted for the relationship between task and work responsibility i-deals and OCBs. Supported by the findings, I assert that resources should be more efficiently utilized on certain practices aimed at improving employee attitudes and behaviors that fit to the organization’s requirement