Employees’ personal relative deprivation negatively associated with job satisfaction and affective commitment: The mediating role of work-related basic need satisfaction

The current study aims to investigate the relationships between personal relative deprivation and employees’ attitudes towards job and organization and the underlying psychological mechanisms of the associations. Drawing on the self-determination theory, we propose the personal relative deprivation leads to the three work-related basic needs unsatisfied, which in turn lower the job satisfaction and affective commitment. We collected data from 390 participants recruited from a professional research participation system. The results indicated that higher level of personal relative deprivation significantly reduce individual’s job satisfaction and affective commitment. The indirect effects of personal relative deprivation on the job satisfaction or affective commitment through the satisfaction of the autonomy needs or the satisfaction of the relatedness needs are significant, while the mediating effects of the satisfaction of competence needs are nonsignificant.