精神型领导与员工职业呼唤——自我决定理论视角的研究

Spiritual Leadership and Career Calling:A Research Based on Self-determination Theory

职业呼唤是激发员工积极工作态度和行为的重要方式。本文基于自我决定理论的视角来考察精神型领导如何影响员工的职业呼唤,并探讨员工权力距离倾向的调节作用。基于363位企事业单位和政府机构员工的调查研究发现:精神型领导显著正向影响员工的职业呼唤,员工的自主性动机在其中发挥部分中介作用;员工的权力距离倾向正向调节精神型领导与其职业呼唤之间的关系,进一步表现为有中介的调节作用,即对于高权力距离倾向的员工,精神型领导通过自主性动机的中介作用对其职业呼唤的积极影响会更加显著。研究结论对于组织有效促进员工的职业呼唤、内在激励员工具有借鉴意义。

Stimulating employees career calling is a significant way to motivate their positive work attitudes and behaviors.However,only John et al.(2015),Duffy et al.(2012),Harzer and Ruch(2012)and Xie et al.(2016)explored the influence of religious beliefs,job interests,core self-evaluation,and professional cognition on career calling which are not sufficient to guide the positive role of career calling in management practice.Spiritual leadership emphasis on individual satisfaction with the pursuit of the connection between work and life meaning,which could be an essential element affecting employees career calling.Leadership effectiveness researches consider leadership plays an indirect role by influencing employees motivation or cognition firstly.Besides,Dobrow et al.(2011)stressed that employees career calling is closely related to their autonomic motivation.Therefore,based on self-determination theory,this study used autonomic motivation as a mediator to explore the mechanism.Moreover,leadership contingency theory points out that individual factors can restrict the effectiveness of leadership behaviors.Therefore,this study explored the boundary conditions of the impact mechanism by using employees power distance orientation.The samples came from 363 employees of enterprises,public institutions and government agencies.From data analysis,the results showed that spiritual leadership dramatically enhanced employees career calling and the relationship between them was partially mediated by autonomic motivation.Employees power distance orientation positively moderated the relationship between spiritual leadership and employees career calling.In others word,the main effect of spiritual leadership on employees career calling would be stronger when the employees power distance orientation was higher.Furthermore,power distance orientation acted as a mediated moderator which positively moderated the relationship between the spiritual leadership and employees career calling.The theoretical significances lie in the following three aspects.At first,it expands the research on the influence factors of employees career calling from the organizational level and confirms that employees career calling could be positively predicted by spiritual leadership.More importantly,it has found the“key”of autonomic motivation from the perspective of self-determination theory to reveal the inner path of spiritual leadership affecting employees career calling,which echoes Duffy s and Dik s(2013)appeal for strengthening theoretical orientation in career calling researches.Thus,self-determination theory should be applied in the research of career calling in the future.Secondly,this study verifies the positive moderating effect of power distance orientation from the perspective of leadership-member exchange,which may contradict the previous view that the power distance orientation to be negatively moderated.Therefore,studying and analyzing the moderating effect of the power distance orientation,combined with the characteristics of the leadership behavior is essential.Thirdly,this study verifies that power distance orientation acted as a mediated moderator can reveal the inner mechanism of spiritual leadership affecting employees career calling more deeply and comprehensively than those researches just study the effects of moderator or mediator.There are three practice significances.Firstly,while meeting employees material needs,leaders should also meet employees spiritual needs through vision,belief and altruistic love,which can fundamentally motivate employees to generate positive work attitudes and behaviors continually.Secondly,based on the theory of self-determination,leaders could improve employees autonomic motivation to promote career calling of staff by satisfying the three basic psychological needs of autonomy,ability and relationship.Thirdly,according to different power distance orientations of employees,leaders shouldn t arbitrarily hold the idea that the influence on employees of lower power distance orientation could be more significant.All in all,leaders should express spiritual leadership behaviors in a targeted manner to stimulate employees career calling and potentials.