The Relationship Between Authentic Leadership And Employees' Job Autonomy:The Mediating Role Of Work Passion

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the relationship between authentic leadership, work passion and employees' job autonomy. The study took Passion Scale,Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and Job Autonomy Scale as measuring instruments to conduct a questionnaire survey among enterprises employees in Heilongjiang, Beijing, Hebei, Shanghai and other provinces. Based on random sampling method, a total of 600 questionnaires were distributed while 550 questionnaires were received and 480 questionnaires were valid. The study used correlation analysis,regression analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and other statistical analysis techniques to explore the relationship between authentic leadership, work passion and job autonomy to verify the mediating role of job autonomy between authentic leadership and harmonious passion and obsessive respectively. The results are as follows:(1) The level of work passion was generally low,and the level of harmonious passion was higher than obsessive passion.(2) Authentic leadership, work passion and job autonomy had significant differences on some demographic variables.(3) There was a significant positive correlation between the authentic leadership,harmonious passion and job autonomy; there was a significant negative correlation between authentic leadership,job autonomy and obsessive passion.(4) On one hand, job autonomy played an intermediary role between the authentic leadership and harmonious passion, authentic leadership effectively enhanced the employees' harmonious passion by improving the level of employees' job autonomy; on the other hand, job autonomy played an intermediary role between the authentic leadership and obsessive passion,authentic leadership weakened employees' obsessive passion by improving the level of employees' job autonomy.Authentic leadership was an important organizational factors to impact employee passion, improving job autonomy could stimulate the harmonious passion and reduce obsessive passion. Thus, on the one hand, enterprises should pay attention to the selection and training of authentic leadership which could provide autonomy environment and stimulate harmonious passion; on the other hand, companies should identify the type of employees' work passion and enhance their harmonious passion and avoid obsessive passion by providing job autonomy.