Linking leadership styles to work engagement: The role of psychological capital among Chinese knowledge workers

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between leadership styles, psychological capital and job engagement.

Data were collected among knowledge workers working no less than 1 year in three high-tech enterprises in Henan Province, China. The investigation was conducted with the cooperation from the human resource departments of the selected enterprises from August to October 2014. To minimize potential common method bias, the authors adopted a cross-lagged design with a time gap of four months. The statistical methods included descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling (SEM) and bootstrap analysis.

The results showed: leadership styles significantly influenced employees’ psychological capital and work engagement; specifically, transformational and transactional leadership positively predicted employees’ psychological capital and work engagement; compared with transactional leadership, transformational leadership had stronger predictive power to employees’ psychological capital and work engagement; employees’ psychological capital positively predicted their work engagement; and employees’ psychological capital acts as partial mediator between leadership styles and employees’ work engagement.

Although a body of studies have shown that leadership is an important factor influencing employees’ work attitude and outcomes, it is only in recent years that the effect mechanism of leadership becomes a hot subject in organizational behavior and management fields. As for leadership styles, in general, most research concerned transformational leadership, rather than transactional leadership and only a little of research compared the effects of transformational leadership and transactional leadership on employees’ work outcomes. In terms of outcomes of leadership, as noted earlier, the previous research mainly explored job performance, job satisfaction, innovation behavior, job burnout and so on. Regarding the effect of leadership styles on employees’ work engagement, in spite of more and more supportive evidence of the link between transformational leadership and work engagement, few studies examined the relationship between transactional leadership and work engagement. What’s more, to the best of our knowledge, till now, no empirical research has explored the internal mechanism of this effect from the perspective of psychological capital. Therefore, the present study is a breakthrough for the direct model of leadership styles and employees’ engagement, theoretically bridges the research gap and contributes to the existing literature by presenting a new picture of leadership behavior effect mechanism.