Employees’ connectedness to executives predicts job attitudes and quitting

Abstract

PurposeAgainst the backdrop of a competitive hiring market and historically high rates of quitting, the current research examines a factor that could support talent retention in organizations: employees’ feelings of connectedness to their top executives. The authors examined the relationship between workers’ feelings of executive connectedness and job attitudes relative to other antecedents and its predictive power for quitting over and above manager and team connectedness.Design/methodology/approachIn Study 1, the authors measured the relative predictive power of executive connectedness, along with 14 other antecedents, for the outcome of job attitudes in ten samples totaling over 70,000 observations, including two longitudinal samples. In Study 2, the authors used path analysis to test the relationship between executive connectedness and actual quitting, controlling for workers’ feelings of connectedness to their manager and teammates, in two (related) longitudinal samples.FindingsExecutive connectedness was robustly related to concurrent and future job attitudes, and it outranked manager variables in all samples. Executive connectedness predicted quitting, even when controlling for manager and team connectedness; this effect was mediated by job attitudes in one of two samples.Practical implicationsExecutive connectedness could be an underutilized resource for understanding and possibly improving employee attitudes and retention. Executives should not delegate all responsibility for employee attitudes and retention to managers.Originality/valueThis research is to the authors' knowledge the first to systematically test the unique predictive validity of employees’ feelings of connectedness to executives for important outcomes. The results suggest that executive connectedness may be an important factor in employees’ workplace experience.