Research On The Relationship Among Paternalistic Leadership,Psychological Empowerment And Organizational Commitment

Leadership behavior is one of the product of social culture, different cultural backgrounds would have a different leadership behavior. Paternalistic leadership with a distinctive local characteristics is widely found in Chinese enterprises.Large number of studies have shown that the paternalistic leadership can explain the Chinese leadership effectiveness, such as employee satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, etc, which also has an important impact on the organization’s performance. Organizational commitment is an important concept in the field of organizational behavior, which has a strong explanatory power for the employees’ job satisfaction, loyalty and turnover rate, it is a focus of attention for many scholars and managers. Psychological empowerment is currently receiving more attention in academia because of its connotation is more abundant than the authorized acts’s, Conger&Kanungo (1988) pointed out that the employees’ initiative is not necessarily a direct result of the transfer of power, the authorization can improve the performance of employees depends largely on the employees’ psychological feelings, authorization can take effect only when employees feel "authorized". This paper attempts to probe into the correlation among the psychological empowerment, paternalistic leadership and organizational commitment, and the specific mechanism of action, that is how paternalistic leadership influence employees’ organizational commitment by means of psychological empowerment.Based on the large number of domestic and international literature review and reorganizing, this paper builds the relational model of paternalistic leadership, psychological empowerment and organizational commitment, and put up the hypothesis about the relationships. According to the models and assumptions, we designed the questionnaire used the mature scale, which has been repeated verified in the domestic and has high reliability and validity. The survey sample comes from the students of Dalian’s MBA classes and their company’s employees, we issued a total of380questionnaires, and349questionnaires were returned, the valid questionnaires are320, recovery rate of valid questionnaires is80.9%. And then the collected data were analyzed using SPSS18.0, LISREL8.7statistical methods, and verified the validation of models and hypothesis, the following conclusions were made: (1) There was a significant positive correlation between paternalistic leadership and organizational commitment of the employees, but as to the different dimensions of paternalistic leadership, it has a different impact on the organizational commitment.(2) There was a significant positive correlation between paternalistic leadership and employee psychological empowerment, but as to the different dimensions of paternalistic leadership,it also has a different impact on the psychological empowerment.(3) There was a significant positive correlation between psychological empowerment and organizational commitment.(4) Psychological empowerment of employees plays a mediating role between paternalistic leadership and organizational commitment.(5) Personality characteristics for example demographic variables (age, education level, work experience,marital status, etc.) and organizational characteristics (ownership) plays a intermediary role in the relationship of the paternalistic leadership, psychological empowerment and organizational commitment.