The Effect Of Authentic Leadership On Employee’s Work Engagement And Turnover Intention

With the emergency of positive psychology, the positive side of human beings has attracted interests ofresearchers including organizational psychologists. Work engagement is such a positive psychologyconstruct, which refers to the employee’s continuous and positive emotion in the workshop characterizedvigor, dedication and absorption. turnover intention which refers to the employee’s emotion to turnover.During the last a few years, factors that can improve work engagement have been the focus in the literature.However, there has been little research looking at the relationship between leadership styles and workengagement and turnover intention. In response, the present study we examined the relationship betweenleadership style and work engagement and turnover intentions; furthermore, we proposed and tested threemediators or mechanisms between leadership style and work engagement and turnover intention:(a)professional identity,(b) organizational commitment, and (c) perceived organizational support. At the sametime to explore the moderating effect of perceived organizational support.Unlike other leadership style theories that focus on the leader’s talent element, the authentic leadershipmodel focuses on the ethic element of the leader. Because the Chinese traditional culture values ethics morethan talent, it makes sense to examine authentic leadership as a leadership style.255Participants wereinvestigated in the study, and authentic leadership scale, professional identity scale, organizationalcommitment scale, perceived organizational support scale,turnover intention scale were adopted, then theresearch examined the multiple mediation of the professional identity, affective commitment and perceivedorganizational support between authentic leadership and work engagement and turnover intention withSEM. Finally, stepwise regression analysis method is used to test the perceived organizational supportfunction for Authentic leadership and the relationship between work engagement and turnover intention.Results based on structural equation models indicated that:(a) professional identity partially mediatedthe relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement and turnover intention;(b)organizational commitment partially mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and workengagement and turnover intention;(c) perceived organizational support also partially mediated therelationship between authentic leadership and work engagement and turnover intention; and (d) the totalindirect was also significant. In other words, when considering all the mediation variables at the same time, Professional identity, organizational commitment and the perceived organizational incompletely mediatedthe relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement. Thus, as a leadership style focused onthe ethics, authentic leadership can have positive influence on the employees’ work engagement through theprofessional identity, organizational commitment and the perceived organizational support. professionalidentity, organizational commitment and the perceived organizational completely mediated the relationshipbetween authentic leadership and turnover intention. And the results show that perceived organizationalsupport for Authentic leadership and the relationship between turnover intention has a moderating effect(β=-0.121, p <0.05).A leader can improve the employees’ work engagement trough engaging in more authentic leadershiptype of behaviors. And a leader can induce the employees’ turnover intention trough engaging in moreauthentic leadership type of behaviors. The present study contributes to the current literature and promotesour understanding about the relationships between authentic leadership and work engagement and turnoverintention.