Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a model examining how three influential organizational factors – authentic leadership, transparent organizational communication, and employee engagement – are linked to employee trust.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducted an online survey on a random sample of 391 employees across different industry sectors in the USA.
Findings
Authentic leadership, transparent organizational communication, and employee engagement directly and significantly influenced the level of trust that employees have toward their organizations. Authentic leadership indirectly impacted employee engagement through transparent organizational communication. Authentic leadership also indirectly affected employee trust via the presence of transparent organizational communication and employee engagement.
Practical implications
The study informs communication managers and organizational leaders with the importance of integrating authentic leadership and transparent communication skills, strategies, and tactics in various training and mentoring workshops. Creating a motivating, nurturing, and transparent organizational environment contributes to employee engagement and trust.
Originality/value
This study examines the drivers of employee trust by testing the effects of employee engagement, authentic leadership, and transparent organizational communication.
This study is aimed at providing a more accurate estimate of the returns to schooling in China by controlling for unobserved ability heterogeneity and measurement errors. We identify a unique instrument to correct for the omitted ability bias. We find that the attenuation bias caused by measurement error dominates the omitted ability bias in the OLS estimation. Based on the GMM estimation, for young workers in China, the return to schooling is 15.0% overall and 16.9% for women.
Employee engagement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are two important issues attracting an increasing amount of attention from both business communication researchers and practitioners. A theory-driven model that (1) conceptualizes employee engagement as social media engagement, job engagement, and organizational engagement, and (2) explicates how they are related to an organization’s CSR communication strategies and employee perceived CSR motives is still lacking. To place our study in the context of CSR and business communication, we proposed a strategies-motives-employee engagement model. Results from an online Qualtrics survey (n = 836) supported all our hypotheses except for the direct link between interacting CSR communication strategies and employee organizational engagement. We conducted a two-step Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis to test all our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications of the study were discussed.
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