The Mechanisms By Which Paternalistic Leadership Impacts On Employee Engagement

Facing the fierce competition in the market, more and more managers have realized that employee engagement can sustainably bring enterprises the core competitive advantage. Although since the ancient times professionalism has been the Chinese traditional virtues, the Chinese people’s professionalism is gradually missing due to the nature of utilitarian, short-term and impetuous of the market economy. Relevant report showed that only six percent of Chinese employees have the professional dedication sprit. This is less than half of the world average. Thus, how to improve Chinese employee engagement has been an important issue for managers and scholars today.With the positive psychology movement developed, scholars have been great interest in employee engagement. However, compared with business practices, current empirical studies on the antecedents of employee engagement are still too little. According to the organization personification theory, as the spokesperson of the organization, the managers’leadership is one of the key factors which impact the employee engagement. As a Chinese localization leadership, paternalistic leadership has more effectiveness than the western theories. But there are still some problems on the concept of three dimensional theory of paternalistic leadership, especially on the dimension of authoritarian leadership. Mainly as follows:the negative correlation between authoritarian leadership and other two dimensions may break the concept structure of paternalistic leadership; the effectiveness of authoritarian leadership still need be discussed. Thus, this paper aims to explore the dimensions of authoritarian leadership and study the mechanisms by which paternalistic leadership impact on employee engagement under Chinese context.This mechanism is mainly consisted of the following three aspects:the direct effect of paternalistic leadership on employee engagement; the mediating effect of perceived organizational support on the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee engagement; the moderating effect of locus of control on the mediating route of "paternalistic leadershipâ†'perceived organizational supportâ†'employee engagement". Data were collected by two times from310employees of one large-scale private enterprise in Chinese mainland. Hierarchical regression analysis and moderated path analysis were utilized to analyze the data.In line with hypotheses, results of hierarchical regression analysis revealed that, both of benevolent leadership, moral leadership and shang-yan leadership had significant positive influence on employee engagement, but juan-chiuan leadership had a significant negative influence on employee engagement. The relationship between benevolent leadership and employee engagement was partly mediated by employees’ perceived organizational support. In addition, results of moderated path analysis suggested that it was also moderated by Employees’ locus of control. Meanwhile, the whole indirect effects of benevolent leadership on employee engagement mediated by perceived organizational support and the total effect were also higher when employee was prone to be external locus of control. And there are significant differences among some variables by employees’ gender, age, educational background and serving age.The innovation points of this paper mainly involved that, the mechanisms which benevolent leadership, moral leadership, juan-chiuan leadership and shang-yan leadership impact on employee engagement was systematically explored for the first time. This followed the positive psychology movement and developed the Chinese leadership localization construction; the attribution process of locus of control was comprehensively presented by moderation path analysis. The positive influence of benevolent leadership on perceived organizational support may be stronger when employee was prone to be external locus of control. And with the secondary moderation of locus of control, employee engagement will be improved again by the improvement of perceived organizational support.Limitations and prospects for future research are discussed finally.