The Impact Of Self-leadership To Knowledge Staff’s Work Engagement

At present, the market environment becoming increasingly competitive, complex and scenarios, with the arrival of the global, knowledgeable and informational economy, more and more enterprises establish a model of flexible organizational structure and decentralization management style. In this context, knowledge workers are becoming the key resources to organizational development. As the characteristics of knowledge work, organizational performance relies on knowledge workers’job engagement. Therefore, how to improve the level of knowledge employees’job engagement is particularly important, so it is high important to research on it.In this paper, the main problem is the relationship between self-leadership (marked as "A" in this paper) and job engagement (marked as "C" in this paper), and test the moderating effect of work autonomy (marked as "B" in this paper) between self-leadership and job engagement. On the one hand, most of the theoretical points of enhancing knowledge workers’work engagement are focused on organizational factors, and the theoretical discussion from the perspective of individual employees is rare. Manz has pointed out that the individual’s self-leadership is a valuable personal resource, and according to Stephen Robbins’book "Today management", which mentioned that implied condition to achieve self-leadership, it seems that knowledge workers is the good research object to the subject, but it is still in the exploratory stage, there is few empirical data to support it now. Especially in the Chinese cultural context, the relationship between self-leadership and job engagement is worth studying. On the other hand, in terms of work characteristics, knowledge staff demands more on work autonomy, but there is no evidence that job autonomy can affect self-leadership to exert, so it is necessary to test the moderating effect of work autonomy between self-leadership and job engagement.Based on this, construct an empirical model of this study by analyze the results of previous research, and then obtain data by survey method. Use spss19.0and amos7.0for data analysis, such as reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) Verification of the five dimensional model of self-leadership in the context of china based on the samples of knowledge staff. The five dimensions are "self-goal setting","self-reward", and "self-punishment","self-talk" and "mental imagery of successful future performance.(2) Self-leadership level of knowledge workers varies by gender, age, educational background and company property. The results show that women usually exhibit higher levels of self-leadership than men, and people aged30-40exhibit higher levels of self-leadership. And the results also show that people with higher qualifications demonstrate higher levels of self-leadership, and people worked in foreign ventures shows higher levels of self-leadership.(3) The "self-goal setting","self-talk","self-reward" and "mental imagery of successful future performance" can positively predict work engagement."self-punishment" can not predict work engagement.(4) Work autonomy was found to significantly moderate the relationships beteween self-leadership and work engagement.This paper is an exploratory study of the self-leadership influence mechanisms on job engagement, and the results verification of the moderating effect of work autonomy beteween self-leadership and work engagement. Though this research enriches the relational theory, there are some limitations in this paper. Such as the limited sample size and the limited sample group. For the model of this paper, the theoretical framework is somewhat simple, without considering other intermediary role of variables or manipulated variables.In the future studies, it would be better to use depth interview survey to obtain data, and then use vertical depth study of experimental methods.