Research On The Relationship Of Leader Empowering Behavior, Organizational Identification And Turnover Intention

With increasing competition in the external environment, maintaining human capital is essential to a competitive edge. How to effectively lead employees, to enhance their awareness of the consistency of organizational goals and values and that of their own, in order to reduce turnover rate, is a subject of widespread concern in the academic community today. There were many extensive and in-depth foreign studies of leadership behavior, organizational identification and turnover. Relevant domestic researches in these fields still were in initial stage, and those research results provided a meaningful reference to the management practices for enterprises.This paper attempted to use organizational identification to explore the relationship between leader empowering behavior and turnover intention, especially to research if organizational identification plays the role of an intermediary variable. On the basis of the preliminary study, this paper verified the construct validity of leader empowering behavior, organizational identity and turnover intention.Through questionnaire surveys and statistical analysis, this study reached the following conclusions: leader empowering behavior and turnover intention showed a significant negative correlation, as well as organizational identification and turnover intention, and leader empowering behavior and organizational identification showed a positive correlation. Organizational identification acted the entirely intermediary role.The main innovation of this study are the following: (1) this study has used the leader empowering behavior questionnaire (LEBQ) designed by Konczak et al (2000) for the first time in the domestic academia, and revised organizational identification scale in accordance with previous studies. High reliability and validity of the two scales have been tested by empirical studies; (2) This study selected organizational identification as a intermediary variable to conduct research on the impact of leader empowering behavior to the staff turnover intention, and verified its entirely intermediary role; (3) This study found that in the Chinese management situation, leader empowering behavior showed a one-dimension characteristic, and organizational identification showed a two-dimension characteristic, which were inconsistent with previously point of views widely recognized by Konczak et al (2000) who agreed that the leader empowering behavior has six dimensions, and Mael (1992) who agreed that organizational identification has a single dimension. At the same time, this study also found that leader empowering behavior, organizational identification and turnover intention have significant differences with the change of the level of education of the staff.