The Effect Of Authentic Leadership On Employees' Engagement

In recent years,employee engagement has been a hot research topic in the field of business management.Many researchers found that,compared with unengaged employees,engaged employees demonstrated higher job satisfaction,organizational commitment,and work performance.Hence,it has been a key issue to improve employee engagement for enterprise administrators.Previous studies have indicated that leadership styles of managers have significant impacts on employees' engagement.Authentic leadership,as a frontier discipline of leadership theory,has become a hot topic concerned by researchers and practitioners.Both domestic and international scholars have conducted researches on the relationship between authentic leadership and employee engagement.But most scholars only studied the direct impacts of authentic leadership on employee engagement and the mediating variables between them while rarely explored the moderating variables between them.Therefore,in this study,the author empirically testifies the direct impacts of authentic leadership on hotel employees' engagement by introducing employees' perception of power distance as a moderating variable in order to explore the intrinsic influencing mechanism among them.In order to achieve the research goal mentioned above,the author proposed the research model and hypothesis based on a thorough literature review.In order to testify the research hypothesis,the author performed questionnaire survey on 312 employees from three five-star hotels in Changsha and analyzed the collected data by using dataprocessing software SPSS17.0 and AMOS17.0.The data analysis results showed that:(1)both employees' perception of manager's authentic leadership and its individual dimensions had significant positive effectson employee engagement.(2)employees' perception of power distance imposed a negative moderating effect on the relationship between employees' perception of manager's authentic leadership and employees' engagement.Specificly,employees' perception of power distance had significant negative moderating effects on the relationships between employees' perception of manager's self-awareness and their engagement and between employees' perception of manager's balanced information process and their engagement.It also had significant negative moderating effect on the relationships between employees' perception of manager's transparency and their engagement and between employees' perception of manager's intrinsic morality and their engagement.According to the above research findings,the author suggested the hotel managers to improve employee engagement by adopting authentic leadership style.In addition,hotel managers should pay attention to the effect of employees' perception of power distance and perform different management strategies against different power distance senses,so as to achieve the effectiveness of the leadership behavior.