1. IntroductionCurrent research on organizational behavior in the occupational field has focused on negative organizational influences and countermeasures, such as psychological stress and job burnout on employees, with insufficient attention paid to positive psychological characteristics, such as employees’ work engagement [1]. Employees’ work engagement, as a positive factor measuring work attitudes, is strongly related to outcome variables such as organizational commitment [2], job performance [3], employee willingness to stay [4], and job satisfaction [5], and it is the opposite to the job burnout at the same continuum ends [6,7], with the influence of job resources being significant [8]. A related meta-analytic study noted that various job resources significantly impact work engagement [9]. However, such studies rely heavily on the Job Requirements-Resources Model (JD-R Model) for understanding and explaining employees’ work engagement. The existing JD-R Model should incorporate some new elements. We argue that tight and loose cultures, as an essential factor in the macro-cultural environment, should draw researchers’ attention and focus. Existing research frameworks ignore the antecedent role of organizational cultural factors on work engagement. The influence of hierarchical culture, team climate, and collectivist–individualist values in organizations has been explored in recent years [10]. We point out that whether and how organizational cultural tightness influences work engagement should be included in the research framework.In recent years, organizational cultural tightness, based on the cultural tightness–looseness theory, has emerged as a new perspective for examining various organizational psycho-behavioral phenomena. In particular, the cultural differences between tight and loose cultures have been widely discussed during the COVID-19 pandemic [11]. Based on the perceived strength of social norms and tolerance for deviant behavior among organization members, we conducted an empirical investigation during the pandemic in China to examine the impact of organizational cultural tightness on work engagement in the particular periods. In addition, employees’ work engagement, as a category of research on the relationship between leadership and followership, is more often explored in current research in terms of “leader-centered” leadership style [12,13] and leader-member interaction [14] on employee engagement. While this may demonstrate the direct impact of leadership behaviors on employment, it also reflects the lack of evidence of the effects of organizational culture and leadership behaviors on employee engagement at the team level. To address these issues, we will explore the impact of organizational cultural tightness and team-member exchange on employees’ work engagement from the perspective of organizational culture and focus on the interaction of transformational leadership and organizational cultural tightness to produce the contingency changes. 5. Discussion

Based on the cultural tightness–looseness theory, the data results obtained from the survey analysis and the domestic and international research literature, we explore the impact of organizational cultural tightness on employees’ work engagement and, in the process, discuss the mediating role of team-member exchange in it and the moderating role of transformational leadership. The following main theoretical contributions are as follows.

First, we incorporate organizational cultural tightness as an antecedent variable of employees’ work engagement. It obtains evidence of the existence of a facilitative effect of organizational cultural tightness on employees’ work engagement through path analysis. The findings obtained in this study differ from previous studies that concluded that organizational cultural tightness has a negative effect on employee engagement [27]. Our interpretation of the new findings obtained is mainly based on a new perspective of cultural tightness–looseness theory and a comprehensive evaluation of our findings from the perspective of the characteristics of the Chinese national culture and the working conditions of the participants’ companies. The investigation was conducted in the context of a major historical event, the COVID-19 pandemic, where China, as a representative country of a tight culture, tends to adopt a highly synchronized and committed attitude to address the challenges due to its greater sensitivity to crises historically and ecologically relative to countries with loose cultures [20]. An epidemic such as the COVID-19 pandemic would trigger a high priority, and strict epidemic prevention measures would be implemented in China. This also affects teams and individuals within work organizations. In the broader context of epidemic prevention and control in China. Moreover, China’s traditional national culture has a continuous history of more than 5000 years, which makes the power of history and social culture have a strong influence on the organization and individual employees. The “ritual” culture of traditional Chinese culture represents the high demand of individuals for their own moral code, and the “family and nation” culture essentially represents the tendency of individuals to assume the responsibility of family and nation in the face of major crisis events, to unite and resist difficulties together. Under the influence of such a national culture and individual interaction, organizations tend to set high organizational norms and low tolerance for individual deviations within the organization, including stricter organizational order and more supervision. In the general environment of epidemic prevention and control in China, the tight state of organizational culture is activated, which affects teams and individuals in the work organization, and leaders and employees within the organization shift to the psychological state in crisis situations, which is manifested by increasing the intensity of organizational norms to stimulate the engagement state of employees. Furthermore, the main participants in this study were groups of leaders and employees from private firms, and in a comparative study of firms with different ownership, transformational leadership style was identified as a major factor influencing the strength of organizational culture, and the interrelationship between leaders and employees was stronger in private firms [60]. In the face of the potent threat to life and health posed by the coronavirus, leaders and employees in the organization of tight culture tend to come together to face the crisis and challenges and increase the cultural tightness of the organization as a whole, which to some extent also leads to a sense of consistency and identity in organizational goals, so as to trigger employees to generate a higher level of work engagement status in the pandemic. The study extends the application area of cultural tightness–looseness theory to the study of work engagement. In addition, it interprets the results in the context of the characteristics of Chinese national culture and the changes in organizational work status of companies before and after the epidemic, providing a perspective for better understanding of employees’ work engagement under different cultural tightness and looseness. In addition, the existing literature on the understanding and interpretation of work engagement relies heavily on the traditional job demands–resources model, while the model is also evolving [10]. The organizational cultural tightness involved in this study is an essential addition to work engagement theory research. In summary, we enrich the literature supporting the organizational cultural tightness factor in previous work engagement studies and analyze and explain the findings obtained through the cultural tightness–looseness theory.Second, we highlight the mediating role of team-member exchange in the effect of organizational cultural tightness on work engagement. First of all, the present study draws a different conclusion on the effect of organizational cultural tightness on TMX than previous research, which suggests that high-quality TMX relationships are usually born in a safe, open, and positive interpersonal and psychological environment [34]. However, the results obtained in this study contradict this by adopting the perspective of increased team member unity due to the “adaptability” of the tight culture theory [20]. High organizational norms, monitoring, and punishment reduce intra-organizational variation in a tight culture work organization, resulting in higher cultural strength and coherence. In the face of crises and challenges posed by COVID-19, the power of this tight culture enhances high synchronization and consistency in team members’ working relationships [61]. This consistency leads to higher quality TMX within the organization, as evidenced by a high level of consistency and mutually supportive cognitive states among team members, which strengthens close psychological ties and effective working relationships [30], enhancing the quality and level of work engagement [62]. Moreover, from the perspective of reciprocity, this high level of consistency and synchronization also leads to the establishment of higher reciprocal bargaining among members. Suppose members’ contributions are recognized and rewarded by others in the team. In that case, this will contribute to the organization’s achievement of shared team goals and lead to higher levels of work engagement in this climate. Moreover, the team member relationships examined in this study are based on the “horizontal” relationships between team members, as opposed to the “vertical” relationships between leaders and employees that have dominated the literature [12]. To a certain extent, this is a break from the “leader”-centered approach in previous studies. Lastly, according to the cultural tightness–looseness theory, all participants in this study came from China, a representative country of tight culture. As countries with tight culture always face more challenges in dealing with external environment and real threats [20], the working team under the cultural background of China has a natural tendency of cultural tightness. Therefore, team-member exchange in Chinese work organizations may be a key mediator in explaining the positive effects of organizational cultural tightness on employees’ work engagement in the face of crises and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.Third, we reveal that organizational cultural tightness plays a positive moderating role in promoting organizational employees’ work engagement by transformational leaders, which to some extent, enriches the theoretical framework of the interaction between leadership behavior and organizational cultural factors. Leadership processes do not occur in a vacuum [43], and the influence of leadership behavior and the social culture in which the organization is embedded must be considered simultaneously [44,45]. Therefore, during the research, in examining the mechanism of the effect of organizational cultural tightness on work engagement, since leadership behavior is one of the powerful means to eliminate the unfavorable components of cultural differences [63], we also focused on the influence of transformational leadership style to obtain the best motivational effect on employees’ work engagement. It was shown that transformational leadership could essentially motivate employees’ work engagement by articulating a vision, virtue modeling, etc., similar to the findings obtained from previous studies that transformational leadership creates a good team atmosphere that promotes collaboration, mutual trust, and cooperation [64]. From the perspective of social exchange theory and resource conservation theory, transformational leaders facilitate reciprocity and exchange among team members and give help to other team members based on the resources they have, which is reflected in collaboration, mutual trust and loyalty, cooperation, and social rewards among team members. The unique factor of transformational leadership in the Chinese context, the “virtuous example,” addressed in this study, can motivate employees to engage in their work. Furthermore, transformational leadership can be seen as an immediate work resource available to employees. As this perceived work resource increases, a quality exchange relationship is formed between employees, not just a monetary one, which means that the quality of exchange between team members increases. This suggests that transformational leadership can reinforce the effect of organizational cultural tightness in facilitating team members’ exchange and work engagement.

Finally, we also provide three practical implications for the motivational process of increasing the level of employees’ work engagement in human resource management. Firstly, in a company’s innovation management, the cultural tightness in the organization of each innovation team becomes an essential factor to be considered. The current situation can be determined by measuring the existing cultural tightness. The cultural tightness of the work teams in the company can be adjusted to a certain extent dynamically by enacting and changing the corresponding regulations according to the vision and mission of the work teams in the company. Secondly, based on the perspective of tight-loose cultures, business leaders can combine their behavioral leadership styles with a cultural tightness–looseness contingent management strategy. By strengthening norms in some areas and relaxing them in others, it can ensure, to a certain extent, that the tight and loose cultures become a solid and beneficial force that plays a vital role in leadership behavior in terms of positive attitudes toward employees’ work. Thirdly, the team-member exchange is a crucial factor to be considered in the company’s management. The quality of the relationship between team members may be one of the key factors in motivating employees to work. By facilitating interactions between team members in a company, employees are more likely to enter a state of work engagement, promoting employee performance.