The impact of transformational labor leadership on members' willingness to participate in union activities in Korea: exploration of universality and substitutability for antagonism

Abstract

Korean labor movement was known as militant and dynamic, historically it was based on antagonistic social psychology against military government and employer. This study explored empirically the main impact of transformational leadership on union members' willingness to participate in union activities as well as role substitutability between transformational leader behavior and members' ideological psychology over the impacts on members' willingness to participate in union activities, based on Korean labor contexts. The elements of members' ideological psychology that are introduced in this study are ‘them and us attitude’ and ‘union instrumentality’. The empirical results are as follows. The main impact of transformational leadership on members' willingness to participate in union activities was positive, and the interactional impacts of leadership and social psychology of members on members' willingness to participate in union activities were significantly negative. This result suggests that transformational leadership and members' ideological psychology are acting as substitutes over the impact on members' willingness to participate in union activities. This implies that modern union activation may be more dependent on the dyadic relationships between leader and member rather than ideological psychology of members against employers which has reflected the antagonistic employment relations.