The Impact Of Humble Leadership Behavior On Knowledge Worker's Turnover Intention: Mediating Role Of Job Embeddedness

With the continuous development of economic globalization, every enterpriseis facing fierce competition from all over the world. In the era of knowledge economy, information and knowledge has become the most important strategic resources, and plays a more and more important role. As organizational environments become more dynamic, uncertain, and unpredictable, it becomes increasingly impossible for leaders to lead effectively with the “top-down” leadership style. Nowadays, organizations are complicated and diversified. Leaders can't have enough intelligence and energy to learn all of the knowledge that needed and have a complete control of situations. They need to adopt the “bottom-up” leadership style. Leaders also need to use the talents of knowledge workers by increasingly involving them in the decision-making processes of the organization.As one of “bottom-up” leaderships, humble leadership behavior is a new topic in the area of leadership research and receives more and more attention from researchers in recent years. However, the effectiveness and mechanism of humble leadership behavior still lacks rigorous empirical study. Base on the summarization of previous researches, this article study the relationships between humble leadership behavior, job embeddedness and knowledge worker's turnover intention. Moreover, this article proposes a mechanism model of these variables. In order to test this mediated model, 297 knowledge workers were surveyed with self-report questionnaires in their MBA classes or on the Internet. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data, which is done by SPSS and AMOS. This study takes humble leadership behavior, job embeddedness and turnover intention as independent variable, intermediary variable and outcome variable separately. First, we summarize and define these concepts. Then, theoretically prove the mechanism of how humble leadership behavior affects knowledge worker's turnover intention and the intermediary role of job embeddedness. Finally, we use the data of Chinese knowledge workers obtained with questionnaires to empirically test the assumptions of this article.Results show that humble leadership behavior is negatively related to knowledge worker's turnover intention, which is fully mediated by job embeddedness.Finally we analyze our research conclusions, summarize the limitations of this article and offer managers with some practical suggestions for the improvement of their leadership styles.