Frontiers in Psychology 研究：管理者自由职业者心态取向与关系评价如何驱动外部工作者薪酬决策

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Organizational Psychology

Abstract

Purpose: Organizations increasingly rely on freelancers, yet pay parity between freelancers and comparable employees varies widely. This study introduces Freelancer Mindset Orientation (FMO), managers' perception of freelancing as a legitimate, attractive, and personally resonant career mode, and examines how it shapes pay equality decisions for external workers through relational evaluations and organizational inclusion practices. Design/methodology/approach: Survey data from 353 managers recruited via the Prolific platform were analyzed using path analysis in Mplus 9, with bias-corrected bootstrapped confidence intervals (5,000 resamples) to test mediation and moderation hypotheses. Findings: Managers' Freelancer Mindset Orientation (FMO) was positively associated with pay equality for freelancers and with more favorable relational evaluations of freelancers (perceived fit, commitment/loyalty, and trustworthiness). Relational evaluations were, in turn, positively associated with pay equality and partially explained by the FMO-pay association. The positive association between FMO and pay equality was stronger among managers reporting higher organizational inclusion of freelancers. Inclusion also strengthened the association between FMO and relational evaluations, whereas the association between relational evaluations and pay equality did not vary significantly across inclusion levels. Research limitations: The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. Future research should employ longitudinal designs, multi-source data (payroll records, freelancer reports), and cross-national samples. Practical implications: Organizations can promote pay fairness by developing managerial FMO through training, building trust-based manager-freelancer relationships, and implementing inclusive practices that integrate freelancers into organizational workflows. Originality/value: This study introduces FMO as a novel identity-based micro-level construct and provides the first empirical test of how managerial career orientations, relational evaluations, and inclusion practices jointly determine pay equality for external workers.

Keywords

external workers, Freelancer Mindset Orientation, Inclusion Practices, Pay equality, relational evaluations

Received

16 July 2026

Accepted

28 September 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Peretz, Tziner, Vasiliu and Saseanu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence:

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