This study investigated the mediating effect of psychological empowerment on the relationship between work stress, pay satisfaction, and organisational commitment among academic staff in public universities. A total number of 297 academics responded to this study and Statistical Package Software for Social Science (SPSS) Version 21.0 was used to analyse the collected data. The results indicated that work stress is associated with organisational commitment, whereas pay satisfaction, psychological empowerment, and organisational commitment have significant relationships with each other. Furthermore, multiple regression analysis revealed that psychological empowerment partially mediated on the relationship between pay satisfaction and organisational commitment. It is recommended that future research could further extend by including non-academic staff as well.   Keywords: Organisational Commitment, Work Stress, Pay Satisfaction, Psychological Empowerment

The paper discusses the findings of the first stage of data collection from a study on the characteristics of leaders in manager-subordinate relationship in Malaysian organizations. The findings are based on in-depth interviews conducted with focus groups involving Malaysian employees, which focused on employee perspectives on key qualities that leaders possess to uphold and maintain superior-subordinate relationship. The adoption of qualitative approach in this phase of data collection process is crucial in deriving leadership behaviors that are essential in the workplace. The identification of these behaviors could help us generate items for the final phase of our data collection process. The research takes into consideration the argument posed by Bass (2008), which has contended that methodological and substantive issues are likely to broaden through the combination of multiple research approaches such as qualitative interview and focus group discussion. The inclusion of eastern perspectives in a western model would bring a holistic description of a communication model. The interviews were conducted with the hope of identifying the themes of leader-characteristics which would help strengthen the relationships between a manager and his or her employees. This would facilitate further understanding of leader characteristics in superior-subordinate relationship. Eight themes emerged from the interviews. Consequently, this paper furthers theoretical contributions to the research on LMX, and expands the literature on superior-subordinate relationship in the workplace. The paper also highlights the limitations of the study for future research. Keywords: Leader characteristic, superior-subordinate relationship, leader-member agreement, leader-member differentiation, dialogue communication INTRODUCTIONAs a method of communication, dialogue plays an essential role in enhancing organizational effectiveness, transforming organizational participations and influencing relationship development among members of the organization. A research by Cogliser, Schrieshein, Scandura and Gardner (2009) has demonstrated that mutual understanding of superiorsubordinate relationships is crucial as it has relational consequences, which would eventually affect follower outcomes. Despite the encouraging findings, the model has not incorporated cultural elements, and this should be taken into consideration to understanding the relational alignment or "congruence", assessing what we value, thus, maintaining cross cultural relationships (Hofstede, 2001). Demonstrating the effect of cultural conditions is a necessary next step in augmenting our understanding on leader-member agreement and its effects on relationships.

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Every organisation has invested its time, effort and resources to recruit, train and pay employees’ salaries. These investments are important to ensure that the organisation can produce high-quality employees who will remain with the organisation for a long period of time and be part of the successful members of the service team. Although a lot has been done to ensure that employees remain with the organisation, research has found that employee retention remains to be a problem to most organisations. In validating whether the findings from past studies are still consistent with the present situation, the present research aims to further investigate whether work environment, leader communication and job satisfaction still present significant relationships with hotel employee retention. In total, 550 self-administered questionnaires were distributed to hotel employees attached to 3-star and 4-star hotels located in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Of the total being distributed, 329 were returned and considered usable for data analysis. The hypothesised relationships between variables were tested using the multiple regression analysis. The findings reveal that workplace environment, leader communication and job satisfaction are significantly related to hotel employee retention. The results also demonstrate that job satisfaction mediates the relationship between workplace environment, leader communication and employee retention. The findings of this research advance the understanding of employee retention and create awareness among hotel management to better appreciate the dimensions of transformation which are essential towards ensuring employee job satisfaction. This will consequently lead to a long-term employee retention. Apart from the findings, the paper also highlights the limitations and suggestions for future research. Keywords: Workplace environment, leader communication, job satisfaction, employee retention, hotel industry.

Although, many researches have described the younger generation to be diverse and active in politics of today, this segment of the population has not been wellacknowledged in the decision-making of politics. This involvement in politics is crucial as it helps in building confidence and skill acquirement that are relevant such as teamwork and effective communication. Hence, the study aims to further investigate their participation in politics and to construct a structural model that displays the associations between perceived information quality (PIQ), online political participation (OPP), political interest (PI), political knowledge (PK) and social media usage (SMU) among Malaysia's ABOUT THE AUTHOR