Mediating role of employee empowerment for transformational leadership and job satisfaction

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction. In addition, it analyzes whether employee empowerment mediates the mentioned relationship. Data were collected from 228 employees of pharmaceutical companies in Jordan (Al Hayat Pharmaceutical Industries, Al Hikma Pharmaceutical Company, and Jordan Swedish Medical Products). The study employed SPSS for data analysis and hypotheses testing. The findings reveal a statistically significant impact of transformational leadership on job satisfaction, empowerment on job satisfaction, transformational leadership on empowerment, and transformational leadership on job satisfaction through empowerment in Jordanian pharmaceutical firms. Furthermore, the results showed that the beta value represents the relative importance, where the intellectual stimulation factor reached the highest level in the size of the impact on the dependent variable, and its value was 0.37 of the total impact. In contrast, inspirational stimulation was the second factor, then the idealized influence factor with 0.30, while the smallest impact size was shown by the dimension of individualized consideration with approximately 0.151. This result indicates the leader’s weak interest and respect for subordinates. The study recommended adopting transformational leadership, supporting employees by empowering them, and conducting more studies on transformational leadership and empowerment in the future.