Basic psychological need satisfaction mediates the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement: A cross‐national study

Abstract

The current study investigates the mediating role of basic psychological need for satisfaction at work (i.e., autonomy, relatedness, and competence) in the relationship between engaging leadership (i.e., inspiring, strengthening, empowering, and connecting) and work engagement. Also, we are proposing and testing an additional need for meaningfulness that plays a similar mediating role. Data were collected from two independent samples from Indonesia (n = 607 state-owned company employees) and Russia (n = 384 civil servants). Results of both samples confirmed that basic psychological need satisfaction (autonomy, relatedness, competence, and meaningfulness) mediated the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement. Multigroup analysis revealed that the parameters of the mediation model were invariant across both national samples, supporting the cross-national validity of the model. When the mediating role of the satisfaction of the need for meaningfulness was tested separately, this appeared only the case in the Russian and not in the Indonesian sample. K E Y W O R D S basic psychological need satisfaction, cross-national validity, engaging leadership, work engagement

Engaging Leadership and Its Implication for Work Engagement and Job Outcomes at the Individual and Team Level: A Multi-Level Longitudinal Study

“…At the cross level, engaging leadership at the team level at time 1 was positively related to individual job performance, employee learning, and innovative work behavior at time 2 through WE at time 2 (H3a,b,c). These results confirmed earlier research on engaging leadership and work engagement [21][22][23], and on work engagement and job outcomes such as job performance, employee learning and innovative work behavior [9,10,14,[58][59][60]. However, the cross-level relationship between engaging leadership at the team level at time 1 and individual job outcomes at time 2, through TWE at time 2 was only observed for job performance (H2a), but not for learning and innovative work behavior.…”

“…Furthermore, meaningfulness has a strong positive association with work engagement [37]. A recent cross-national study that included samples from Indonesia and Russia found that the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (including the need for meaningfulness) mediated the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement in both countries [23]. This result supports the assumption that engaging leaders foster their employee's work engagement through satisfying their basic needs for competence, relatedness, autonomy, and meaningfulness.…”

“…Engaging leaders who inspire, strengthen and connect employees enable them to perceive and use more resources in their work environment such as social support from colleagues and job autonomy [22]. In line with this reasoning, a recent study found that engaging leadership increases work engagement by fulfilling employees' basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, relatedness, and meaningfulness [23].…”

“…Engaging leadership was measured by the 12 items of the Engaging Leadership Scale [21,23], which assesses four aspects of engaging leadership with three items each; strengthening, connecting, empowering, and inspiring. Sample items are: "My supervisor delegates tasks and responsibilities to team members" (strengthening); "My supervisor encourages collaboration among team members" (connecting); "My supervisor gives team members freedom to complete their tasks" (empowering), and; "My supervisor is able to enthuse team members with his plans" (inspiring).…”

“…In the current research, we propose a specific kind of leadership that fosters (team) work engagement as a key (mediating) variable in the motivational process. Recent research has focused on leadership that specifically aims at increasing work engagement-that is, engaging leadership [21][22][23]. Engaging leadership (EL) [21] refers to a positive leadership style that fosters employees' work engagement through a specific psychological mechanism that can be described using the Self Determination Theory (SDT).…”