The relationship between benevolent leadership and affective commitment from an employee perspective.

Dorota Grego-Planer,Rogis Baker

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264142

Abstract

Benevolent leadership has emerged as a contemporary leadership style that has been studied only scantly. To fill this gap, this work has two goals. The first is the identification and assessment of the relationship between benevolent leadership and employees’ affective commitment in the context of Polish organizations. Secondly, it will be investigated whether all constructs of benevolent leadership contribute to affective commitment. Data were obtained from 415 company employees. The relationships were investigated using structural equation models (SEMs). Analyses of the results showed that benevolent leadership has a positive relationship with affective commitment. The more benevolent leadership qualities a supervisor has, the more commitment employees show. All dimensions of benevolent leadership are positively correlated with affective commitment. However, the greatest was found in the “community dimension.” All analyzed dimensions correlate positively with each other, so there is a high probability that if a leader displays one BL dimension, he will also display another.

Highlights

The subject literature pays much attention to different leadership styles
It should be emphasized once again that the author consulted the proposal of such an approach to the BL study with the creator of the BLS (Benevolent Leadership Scale), Fahri Karakas, who decided that it was an interesting direction in the research of benevolent leadership
The survey was sent to employees of enterprises that were included in the list of Polish socially responsible companies (XIII Ranking of Responsible Companies 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Research on leadership styles has focused on transformational leadership [1, 2], ethical leadership [3], spiritual leadership [4], servant leadership [5] or authentic leadership [6, 7]. While each of these leadership theories emphasizes the importance of morality at its root, they differ quite significantly from each other. Transformational leadership, defined as “the process of influencing major changes in attitudes and assumptions of organizational members and building commitment for the organizations mission and objectives” focuses on a leader– follower relationship that benefits both the individuals involved and the organization as a whole [8]. Ethical leadership is defined as “The demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion