The Relationship Between Transformational Leadership And Organizational Citizenship Behavior Among Healthcare Professionals In Ethiopia

Transformational leadership has captured widespread consideration in management research.In this field,the impact of transformational leadership on workforce behaviors is an essential branch.One of the challenges associated with healthcare services is the issue of shaping employees behaviours.Employee attitudes and behaviours,including organizational citizenship behaviour,reflect their perceptions and expectations,reciprocating the treatment that they receive from their organisations.Studies have shown that transformational leadership is an influential factor in stimulating organizational citizenship behaviour in many industries.A transformational leader assists the level of workforce commitment and their extra role behavior which is referred to as organizational citizenship behavior.Today,the linkage between transformational leadership and job outcomes has been firmly established in a number of studies.The present study contributes to the academic and development community because it provides understanding of the role of transformational leadership in terms of four important dimensions(intellectual stimulation,inspirational motivation,idealized influence,individualized Consideration)and how these affect organizational citizenship behaviour by incorporating transformational leadership theory and functional Leadership theory.Literature shows that gaps still exist pertaining to understand the extent to which how Transformational Leadership affect the employee's organizational citizenship behaviours at workplace This study attempts to fill this gap in the existing body of Knowledge by investigating the role of transformational leadership on organizational citizenship behaviour directly and indirectly throughmediating and moderating role of work-life balance and demographic variables(experience,profession,gender and age).The importance of work-life balance in the field of human resources management which is receiving increasing attention from policy makers,organizations,management,employees and their representatives globally.Today's global market place demands conflicting professional responsibilities in the form of unflinching ‘work–life commitment'.In organizational context,a high quality of work–life balance is essential to continue attracting and retaining its employees.This kind of practice is having significant implications on employee attitudes,behaviors,well-being as well as organizational effectiveness.Recent studies have gained significant interest on the association of Work-life balance with transformational leadership and employees behaviours in both developed and developing countries.Transformational leaders are likely to encourage their followers to find solutions to Work–life balance related matters;as such leaders are open to new and creative ideas about how to get the work done without detriment to work–life balance.There is a plethora of research demonstrating the importance of work–life balance for the health,behaviors and wellbeing of workforce.Therefore,there is a need to understand the impact of work life balance in the association between transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behaviour of employees.This is more pertinent,especially in the Ethiopian healthcare,where there is need to meet the leadership resource demands of a growing economy requires motivated workforce to support the sector.This study also focused on the moderating roles of played by demographic variables such as(experience,profession,gender and age)between work life balance and organizationalcitizenship behavior.These demographic constructs affect the meaning attributed to organizational citizenship behaviors by coworkers who observe or benefit from it.Work life balance is a contextual factor that may influence the transparency of the work environment and,as a consequence,the utility of organizational citizenship behaviors for achieving these specific goals.The present study investigated the role of experience in terms of number of years spent in health care organization.With regard to profession,it was assessed by forming two categories(clinical and non-clinical)to determine the impact of profession in the case of gender was determined that the pattern of male versus female employee organizational citizenship behavior,in response to work life balance,is likely to differ depending on work life balance.In similar way the impact of different age categories was also investigated in relation to work life balance and organizational behaviors.The main objectives of the research were to explore the extent to which transformational leadership affects the organizational citizenship behaviours of employees among hospital employees.Moreover,the second objective was to reveal the mediating role of work life balance in the relationship between Transformational Leadership and organisational citizenship behaviour of healthcare sector.The study also sought to determine the moderating role of demographic factors such as experience,profession,gender and age on the association between work-life balance and organisational citizenship behaviour among healthcare professionals.To achieve these six main objectives of the study,hypotheses were developed and tested.This research is innovative in several areas,but,three of them are very significant.The first innovation of this study relates to the influence individual dimensions of transformationalleadership on organizational citizenship behavior.Moreover,this research seeks to establish the mediating role of work-life balance between individual attributes of transformational leadership(intellectual stimulation inspirational motivation idealized influence,and individualized consideration)and organizational citizenship behavior.This enables the researcher to identify the influence of work-Life Balance on dimensions of transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.Similarly the study establish the level of specificity in terms of moderating impact of experience,profession,gender and age on the relationship between work-life balance and organizational citizenship behavior.As there is plethora of studies related to these constructs in the extant literature.Thus,this conceptualization of framework adds to the existing literature of Transformational Leadership.The other innovation of this research relates to the context of study,while the extant literature presents different accounts of the interplay between leadership,work-life balance and organizational citizenship behavior,a greater proportion of them have been done in the developed world as opposed to developing areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.Being the first of its kind among Ethiopian hospitals to be done at an advance level,this research is a ground breaking work and ignites academic curiosity to further explore other engaging issues in hospital human resource management.The third innovation of this research shows the methodological contribution.Other studies have studied Transformational Leadership style together with Transformational Leadership.In these studies,there is a mix of the dimensions of transformational leadership.Hence,there is always confusion in the measurements of transformational leadership.The reliance of this research on investigating the relationships of specific transformationalleadership dimensions against Organizational Citizenship Behavior with Work Life Balance and demographic variables makes this study innovative and is the first of its kind in a developing African setting.Moreover,most of the studies on Transformational leadership in perspective of Ethiopia have much worked on qualitative side,this study adopts quantitative approach to estimate the impact of variables on each other,Thus the research uses a novel and well-integrated constructs to measure work life balance in order to obtain accuracy of findings.Data for the research was collected through a survey from a randomly selected sample of841 clinical and non-clinical staff from ten major hospitals in Ethiopia.Statistical analyses were carried out by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS)version 24 to test the hypothesised relationships.The finding of this study shows that all dimensions of transformational leadership were positively correlated with organizational citizenship behaviour except one dimension.Specifically,results show that transformational leadership dimensions represented in the multifactor transformational leadership scale such as intellectual stimulation,inspirational motivation and idealized influence,demonstrated strong statistical correlation with organizational citizenship behaviour.However,the finding with regarding to impact of individualized consideration on organizational citizenship was not supported.Furthermore,the finding of the mediation effect of work life balance in the relationship between the dimensions of transformational leadership and organisational citizenship behaviour revealed significant impact of Work-Life Balance.Moreover the study demonstrated significant moderating impact of experience,profession,gender,and age.It was observed that the most experiencedemployees shown high level of organisational citizenship behaviour,similarly clinical professionals have shown high degrees of organisational citizenship behaviour,subsequently,the finding of gender was also observed that the influence on work life balance were stronger among female than male respondents.Finally the findings of age indicated that the most senior employees exhibited high organisational citizenship behaviour.From the findings,it is recommended that Ethiopian healthcare managers must invest in leadership training and development to consolidate any gains from the on-going health sector development programs.The needs of women clinical staff must stand out for consideration in any sectorial development programmes since they are most affected by the work-life imbalances which come with several challenges.