A Research on the Influence of Leadership Style and Job Characteristics on Job Performance among Accountants of County and City Government in Taiwan

Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to explore the effect of leadership style and job characteristics on job performance and examine the mediating effect of organization commitment on the leadership style, the job characteristics and the job performance as well as to provide the management suggestions according the research findings.The questionnaires are applied to the accountants of county/city government in Taiwan, and the convenience sampling is adopted. The following research findings are described after conducting the statistical analyses. Firstly, this research finds that the more idealized influence for the county/city mayor is, the stronger ability of problem solving for the associated accountants are. In addition, the better management by exception conducted by the mayor, the more ability of problem solving for accountants exists, and therefore the higher passion of innovation happens. Secondly, this research also reveals that the more job autonomy, job importance, and job diversity happen, the stronger ability of problem solving for the accountants are. Besides, the higher job autonomy for accountants exists, the higher passion of innovation happens. The mediating effect of organization commitment was found between transformational leadership and job performance. It indicates that organization commitment would be a mediator between transactional leadership and job performance.

Work-Family Psychological Contract, Job Autonomy and Organizational Commitment

“…Other researchers (Liu et al, 2010;Chu and Lai, 2011;Galletta et al, 2011) have also reported that job autonomy is a significant predictor of organizational commitment. With regard to job autonomy and its association with WFPC, this study found that an increase in job autonomy led to an increase in WFPC.…”

“…This is further supported by results from the study of Galletta et al (2011) concerning the attractive working environment characteristics which showed that job autonomy perceived by workers was among the most important factors related to retention. Other studies also reported that job autonomy had a significant relationship with organizational commitment (Liu et al, 2010;Chu and Lai, 2011). Based on the above argument, the following hypothesis was formulated.…”

Skill Variety, Family-friendly and Task Performance: The Moderation of Market Orientation

“…He defined task performance as " the proficiency with which incumbents perform activities that are formally recognized as part of their jobs; activities that contribute to the organization's technical core either directly by implementing a part of its technological process, or indirectly by providing it with needed materials or services". While Contextual performance means the extra-role behaviors engaged in by employees over and above their task requirements, which emphasizes selflessness and mutual cooperation (Chu, & Lai, 2011). In recent years, the definition of job performance has been expanded to three broad dimensions: task performance, organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive behaviors.…”

“…Piccolo and Colquitt (2006) proposed that jobs regarded as important, challenging and allows employees to use various skills and talents are more likely to create perceived meaningfulness in employees' job, while the meaningfulness of work could improve employees' job performance because they believe that their job can make significant contributions to the society (Ghosh et al, 2015). Similarly, Chu and Lai (2011) founded that skill variety is significantly positively influence the task performance, because task performance is the core dimension of job performance and occupies the greatest weight of it ( Rotundo, & Sackett, 2002). Accordingly, we can image that skill variety facilitate employee's task performance positively.…”

“…According to Hackman and Oldham (1975), "Skill variety" is the first dimension of the job characteristic model, which is defined as "the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities to carry out the work, which involve the use of a number of different skills and talents of the employee". Majority of past studies only discussed how the whole job characteristic impact on employees' behaviors (e.g., Daniels, 2006;Chu, & Lai, 2011), while there is almost no literature focused on the individual influence of skill variety on employees' behaviors. On the other hand, family friendly refers to "any benefit, working condition, or personnel policy to assist family members in balancing the conflicting demands of work and home life" (Glass, & Fujimoto, 1995), which is generally used to support employees to balance the conflicting demands of work and family life (Pradhan, Jena, & Kumari, 2016).…”