Leadership and Team Values Shape Employee Engagement: Test of a Multilevel Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

The current research scrutinized how a leader's communication and team value orientations interactively relate to employee engagement. The proposed model hypothesized that the impact of leadership on engagement would be mediated by followers' trust toward a leader and this leadership-trust-engagement linkage would be moderated by team power distance and collectivism; in addition, employee voice behavior was examined as a behavioral manifestation of engagement. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling analyses with the data collected at a large electronics company in Japan (n = 638 members and 68 team leaders) revealed that transformational leadership was positively associated with employee trust and engagement when team power distance and collectivism were high, but not when those team values were low. Transactional leadership had negative effects on trust and engagement, regardless of team values. Finally, engagement was strongly positively associated with employee voice behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Transactional leadership matters in green creative behaviour through workplace learning and green knowledge management: moderating role of social network sites use

“…First, scholars have employed social media as a useful tool to encourage creativity and innovation in organisational management models (Cooper, 2000; Hansen and Pihl-Thingvad, 2019). Second, the cognitive processes involved in socialising and interaction between employees and leaders are crucial to creativity and innovation (Matsunaga, 2018). LMX theory argues leadership is a sort of social exchange in which high-quality leader–member relationships are defined by social values like trust and commitment, while low-quality relationships are defined by economic considerations.…”