真实型领导影响员工工作投入的多重中介效应

The Impact of Authentic Leadership on Work Engagement: Testing a Multiple Mediation Model

为了探讨真实型领导影响员工工作投入的内在作用机制,采用量表法对308名企业员工进行调查,采用结构方程建模的方法对真实型领导影响员工工作投入的多重中介效应进行检验,结果显示:(1)真实型领导对员工的工作投入具有显著的正向预测作用。(2)职业认同、情感承诺和组织支持感分别在真实型领导和工作投入间起中介作用,三个变量的并式多重中介效应在真实型领导和工作投入间起完全中介效应。(3)职业认同、情感承诺、组织支持感的特定中介作用分别占总间接效应的44.0%、42.4%和13.6%。结论:职业认同、情感承诺和组织支持感在真实型领导影响员工工作投入的过程中起完全中介作用。

With the emergency of positive psychology, the positive side of human beings has attracted interests of researchers including organizational psychologists. Work engagement is such a positive psychology construct, which refers to the employee＇s continuous and positive emotion in the workplace characterized by vigor, dedication and absorption. During the last a few years, factors that can im- prove work engagement have been the focus in the literature. However, there has been little research looking at the relationship between leadership styles and work engagement of the employees. In response, in the present study we examined the relationship between leader- ship style and work engagement; furthermore, we proposed and tested three mediators or mechanisms between leadership style and work engagement： （a） professional identity, （b） affective commitment, and （c） perceived organizational support. Unlike other leadership style theories that focus on the leader＇s talent element, the authentic leadership model focuses on the ethic element of the leader. As the Chinese traditional culture values ethics more than talent, it makes sense to examine authentic leadership as a leadership style. 308 subjects participated in the study, and the authentic leadership scale, the professional identity scale, the af- fective commitment scale, and the perceived organizational support scale were adopted. The research examined the multiple mediation of professional identity, affective commitment and perceived organizational support between authentic leadership and work engagement with SEM. Results based on the structural equation models indicated that： （a） professional identity partially mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement （indirect effectβ =. 26, p 〈 . 01 ） ; （b） affective commitment partially mediated the rela- tionship between authentic leadership and work engagement （indirect effectβ = . 27, p 〈 . 01 ） ; （c） perceived organizational support also partially mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement （ indirect effect β = . 08, p 〈 . 05） ; and （d） the total indirect was also significant （β = . 58, p 〈 . 01 ）. In other words, when considering all the mediation variables at the same time, professional identity, affective commitment and perceived organizational support completely mediated the relationship be- tween authentic leadership and work engagement. Thus, as a leadership style focused on the ethics, authentic leadership can have posi- tive influences on the employees＇ work engagement through professional identity, affective commitment and perceived organizational sup- port. A leader can improve the employees＇ work engagement through engaging in more authentic leadership type of behaviors. The pres- ent study contributes to the current literature and promotes our understanding of the relationships between authentic leadership and work engagement.