Effect of transformational leadership on organizational commitment through the interaction of psychological empowerment

Abstract

The present study was aimed at examining the association between transformational leadership and organizational commitment, and the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the association between them. Eventhough there are plenty of empirical studies on the association between leadership styles and organizational commitment in various contexts, there is inadequate evidence in the Sri Lankan context. Considering the gap in the current literature, the study was conducted on the Development Officers working in the public sector organizations in the Jaffna region. For this purpose a sample of 235 Development Officers attached to the District Secretariat and Divisional Secretariats was selected based on random sampling method. The transformational leadership was measured using MLQ-Form 5x (Bass & Avolio, 2000), organizational commitment was measured using OCQ (Meyer & Allen, 1997) and empowerment was measured using Empowerment Scale (Spreitzer, 1995). Exploratory factor analysis and Confirmatory factor analysis were performed to validate the data and then the constructs were integrated in the structural equation model to find the relationships among the variables. The results revealed that the direct effect of transformational leadership on organizational commitment is not significant (b=.011, p>.05). The effect of transformational leadership on psychological empowerment is significant (B=.621, p=.001). The results confirm that psychological empowerment doesn't act as a mediator in the effect of transformational leadership on organizational