Transformational Leadership Incorporating Employee Change Acceptance in the Banking Sector: Mediating Effect of Workplace Spirituality

Abstract

In this era, organizational change is a challenging task, especially to convince employees to accept the change. This study investigates the relationship of employee's acceptance to change with the impact of transformational leadership(TL) and analyses the mediating role of workplace spirituality(WS). Most of the studies in workplace spirituality literature consider transformational leader as an intense stimulation to nurture the spirituality of employees or to make change implementation successful. However, no previous studies explored employee reaction (i.e. acceptance) to change with the potent ingredient of spirituality factors. The data for this purpose was obtained by a time-lagged survey from a sample of 181 employees from private banks of Pakistan, which were used for further analysis using PROCESS (Model 4). The results of this study confirmed that the main effect of TL on Employees acceptance to change. Also, the study confirmed the full mediation of WS between the TL and employee acceptance to change. This study revealed the practical implications in the banking sector to enable the spirituality of employee for making change implementation successful also limitations of the study are highlighted.