The mediating role of person-organization fit in the supportive leadership-outcome relationships

Abstract

This study examines whether person-organization fit (P-O fit) would mediate the relationships of supportive leadership with the outcome variables of turnover intentions and job satisfaction. We collected data from a survey of 310 telecommunication employees in Turkey. Our results show that P-O fit fully mediates the relationship between supportive leadership and turnover intentions, while P-O fit partially mediates the relationship between supportive leadership and job satisfaction. Therefore, person-organization fit is an intermediary mechanism that explains the supportive leadership-outcome relationships. In other words, supportive leadership behavior influences job satisfaction and turnover intentions through the person-organization fit. Specifically, higher levels of supportive leadership behavior predicts greater P-O fit, which in turn is a significant predictor of higher levels of job satisfaction and lower levels of turnover intentions. We evaluated both Baron & Kenny’s approach and Sobel test together in order to achieve more powerful strategy when testing mediation (P-O fit). Both approaches provide evidence for the mediation effect of personorganization fit in this study. Age, gender, and tenure were controlled in order to eliminate spurious relationships. Further, we also examined a series of confirmatory factor analyses, which includes our hypothesized four factor model and three alternative models in order to provide additional evidence for the discriminant validity. Results reveal that hypothesized four factor model fit the data better than any of the three alternative models. The findings of the study suggest important implications for management theory and practice. For instance, when managers provide support and create friendly and psychologically supportive work environments, this promotes employees’ perceived value congruence with their organization and employees probably perceive that they will fit better to such organization, which in turn results with increased level of job satisfaction and decreased level of turnover intentions.