积极领导与员工敬业度的关系研究:基于自我决定视角

A study of the relationship between positive leadership and employee engagement from the perspective of self-determination

采用问卷调查法,以63个团队的288套主管–员工配对数据为样本,基于自我决定视角考察了中国组织情境下积极领导对员工敬业度的影响,以及需求满足和主动性人格在以上关系中所起的中介和调节作用。采用多层线性模型、跨层次被调节的中介效应分析等方法进行统计分析。研究结果表明:积极领导对员工敬业度有显著促进作用;需求满足在积极领导与员工敬业度之间起着部分中介作用;员工的主动性人格水平在积极领导与需求满足之间具有负向调节作用,在需求满足与敬业度之间具有负向调节作用,在积极领导-需求满足-员工敬业度之间也具有调节作用。

Engagement has been the focus of attention in the field of organizational behavior and human resources management in recent years.However,the levels of employee engagement are relatively low in China.Thus,employee engagement has become the bottleneck that restricts the sustainable development of enterprises.Employee engagement not only has an important impact on employee retention rate,individual performance and organizational performance,but also could cause negative emotions of retained employees.Leaders interact frequently with subordinates in the workplace,and thus their leadership behavior has a direct impact on employee engagement.Positive leadership behavior refers to the outstanding and continuously improving leadership behavior that focuses on strengths,talents and development potential.It is recognized that positive leadership is one of the key factors of individual and organizational success.Although many studies have shown that leadership behavior has an important impact on employee engagement,it is still important to explore the influence mechanism of leadership behavior on employee engagement from different perspectives.Previous studies on employee engagement have focused on job demands,job resources and their interaction effects on individuals.Few studies explore the interaction effects of job resources and individual resources on individuals.Positive leadership at the team level can create a positive and harmonious working atmosphere for team members.Personal resources such as proactive personality is also a salient factor influencing employee engagement.Whether positive leadership at the team level leads to employee engagement depends not only on the level of positive leadership,but also on the personal resources that employees possess.This study chooses team supervisors and their immediate subordinates as the research subjects to examine the impact of positive leadership on employee engagement in Chinese organizational context.From the perspective of self-determination,this study introduces individualneed fulfillment as the mediating variable,and proactive personality as the moderating variable to explore the mechanism of positive leadership on employee engagement and possible boundary conditions.Based on a review of the existing literature on positive leadership,employee engagement,need fulfillment and proactive personality,a research model is developed and several hypotheses are put forward.We use the questionnaire to collect data.To avoid the problem of common method biases,the supervisor-subordinate pairing and hierarchical linear modeling methods are used in this study.In order to ensure the accuracy of the meaning of Chinese items,we translate all English items into Chinese according to the procedure of translation and back translation.All items are measured on a 5-point Likert scale and SPSS 20.0 is used to test the internal consistency reliability of each variable.To ensure content validity,the items used to measure positive leadership,employee engagement,need fulfillment,and proactive personality are adapted from the extant literature and modified to fit the study context.Control variables in this study include team size,individual remuneration,unit length of service,age and gender.We aggregate positive leadership at the individual level to the team level.The sample is drawn from 12 enterprises in four regions(Fujian,Anhui,Jiangsu,and Shandong)in East China.The industries involved include service,real estate and manufacturing.Dedicated surveys for supervisors and employees are conducted.Employee questionnaire includes leadership behavior of direct supervisor,employee need fulfillment,engagement and personal basic information.The supervisor questionnaire includes the evaluation of the proactive personality of each subordinate and personal information of the direct supervisor.The respondents are randomly sampled and investigated in two different time periods(interval of one month).In the first stage,the investigated employees are asked to complete the basic information inquiry,the leadership behavior questionnaire and theneed fulfillment questionnaire,and their direct supervisors are requested to complete the basic information investigation and the subordinates’proactive personality evaluation questionnaire.One month after the first stage,the surveyed employees are asked to complete the engagement questionnaire.The researchers first contact the human resources department of each enterprise and ask them to identify the team leaders who participate in the survey,and then each supervisor selects 3 to 6 direct subordinates to participate in the survey according to the principle of random sampling.A total of 90 immediate supervisors and 315 employees fill out the questionnaires.Invalid and mismatched questionnaires,such as those in which fewer than 3 employees in a team are obtained,there are too many blanks or overly consistent answers,are eliminated.In the end,288 valid questionnaires are obtained from 63 teams.An average of 4.57 employees per team answer the questionnaire.Before data analysis,we use SPSS 20.0 to test the internal consistency reliability of the study variables by calculating the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient,and AMOS 17.0 to test the scale’s construct validity by confirmatory factor analysis in the structural equation model.The results show that the scale of positive leadership behavior,need fulfillment and its dimensions,proactive personality,employee engagement and its dimensions have good reliability and discriminative validity.Correlation analysis also shows that there is a significant correlation among the variables in this study.We examine the hypotheses proposed with matched field data collected from 63 team supervisors and 288 employees.The results of the hierarchical linear modeling demonstrate that positive leadership is positively related to employee engagement.The results also reveal that need fulfillment partially mediates the positive leadership–employee engagement relationship.Moreover,employee proactive personality moderates the positive leadership–employee need fulfillment linkage.The effect of positive leadership behavior on employee need fulfillment is stronger for employees with low levels of proactive personality than for employees with high levels of proactive personality.Furthermore,the results of multilevel moderated mediation analysis show that employee proactive personality moderates the mediating effect of need fulfillment on the positive leadership–employee engagement relationship.The mediating effect of need fulfillment on the linkage between positive leadership and employee engagement is significant only among employees who have low levels of proactive personality.Implications for theory and management are discussed.The study contributes to theory and practice by shedding light on the important mechanism and boundary condition of the cross-level impact of positive leadership on employee engagement from the perspective of self-determination.