Supportive Leadership and Job Satisfaction at the European Court of Auditors

Abstract

This paper explores how supportive leadership influences communicative, collaborative and performance management practices and how these three practices, in turn, relate to the job satisfaction of public servants within the European Court of Auditors (ECA) context. Drawing on the person-organization fit and leadership behavior theories the study empirically tests a theoretically derived model of the direct and indirect effects of supportive leadership on employees’ job satisfaction by considering the responses to a survey administered to the ECA staff. The findings of our study show that communicative and collaborative practices mediate the relationship between supportive leadership the job satisfaction of the ECA employees. In the case of performance management practices, instead, we find that, while supportive leadership has a positive relation with performance management practices, these practices have no significant relationship with job satisfaction. This study not only addresses the theoretical void in the field, but also provides an empirical contribution by describing how a professional public European audit institution is managing its human resources, and also highlights the means of doing it.