The Role of Resonant Leadership, Workplace Friendship and Serving Culture in predicting Organizational Commitment: the Mediating Role of Compassion at Work.
| Autor | Ali, Riaz |
| Cargo | Survey |
1 Introduction
Organizational commitment is employees' attitude and loyalty towards their employer (Kumasey, Bawole, & Hossain, 2017; Lee & Reade, 2018). Committed employees serve customers in the best possible manner, which results in the establishment of stronger employee-customer relationships (Ansari & Kashif, 2019; Mawritz, Folger, & Latham, 2014). The context of frontliners is important as they are expected to demonstrate socially desirable emotions during the service work they carry out, which is a challenging task as organizations have so far failed to provide an environment which positively triggers prosocial behaviours (van Gelderen, Konijn, & Bakker, 2017). At the baseline, there is evidence that lower levels of employee commitment to the organization results in poor emotional displays during service performance (Kashif, Zarkada, & Thurasamy, 2017a; Krannitz, Grandey, Liu, & Almeida, 2015). However, when employees decide to remain committed to an organization, there is an ensured tendency to display positive behaviours at work (Schwepker, Dimitriou, & McClure, 2019).
In order to strengthen employee commitment, Lilius and colleagues (Lilius, Worline, Dutton, Kanov, & Maitlis, 2011) proposed an environment based on compassion. Compassion has been discussed in the human relations literature over the years and involves elements of inner feelings towards others and sympathizing and relating with the pain of another person (Kanov et al., 2004). In organizational settings, compassion has been discussed as a feeling where someone is deeply concerned about avoiding other people's suffering, in order to ensure their well-being (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006; Ge, Wu, Li, & Zheng, 2019). Thus, compassion is an empathic response towards others and is different than other constructs such as voluntary behaviours. When displaying voluntary behaviours, individuals act to help others (i.e. working for others, talking and listening), while compassion comprises an emotion that leads to organization-centric behaviours and prevents them from engaging in uncivil behaviours at work (Rhee, Hur, & Kim, 2017). Compassionate individuals not only feel others' pain but are also ready to render material support (Dutton et al., 2006). Compassion at work involves various stages: (a) noticing the pain of another person, (b) having an emotional reaction towards his/her pain, and (c) responding in a way to help and reduce or eradicate that pain (Kanov et al., 2004). These feelings are a product of a comfortable and inspiring workplace culture (Liliuset al., 2011). Such feelings (i.e. compassion) can lead to several positive outcomes, such as employee commitment. For instance, feelings of compassion have been found to trigger proactive and positive behaviours among employees (Hur, Moon, & Ko, 2018; Rheeet al., 2017). In a similar argument, compassion can also lead to organizational commitment among employees, thus addressing a key issue facing service organizations (Kumasey et al., 2017).
In an era where employees working in service organizations feel depressed and face aggressive behaviours at work (Kashifet al., 2017a), the existence of compassion is important to minimize the dark effects of toxic environments (Rheeet al., 2017). In this regard, considering compassion as an outcome of positive organizational behaviours is pivotal. The organizational antecedents of compassion (i.e. the organizational factors that can trigger compassion at work) are unclear and are suggested as a potential area of inquiry (Madden, Duchon, Madden, & Plowman, 2012). Since its inception in the early 2000s, organizational compassion has been examined extensively, but there is still a dearth of studies informing managers to impart compassionate feeling among employees at work (Shahzad & Muller, 2016). There needs to be positive leadership, friendly workplace relationships, and a culture of support to trigger compassionate feelings among employees (Kanov et al., 2004). In line with these guidelines, we present resonant leadership, workplace friendship and serving culture as three new antecedents of compassion at work.
Relationship-oriented leadership styles trigger positive emotions among employees. In this regard, resonant leadership, a relationship-oriented leadership style, is found to trigger positivity among employees (Boyatzis & McKee, 2013; Cummings et al., 2010). Resonant leaders establish stronger emotional bonds with their employees (Koman & Wolff, 2008); they are positive, caring, and spread hope, which enables them to establish stronger emotional ties with their followers (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2013). Resonant leaders are able to establish a culture of support and positivity at work (Bawafaa, Wong, & Laschinger, 2015), which can stimulate employees to display proactive behaviours (Schwepkeret al., 2019). Resonant leadership behaviour results in positive work outcomes, but its association with compassion at work to drive commitment among employees remains unclear (Zulueta, 2016). There may be other leadership behaviours; however, resonant leadership behaviours are found to drive mindfulness and empathy among followers (Singh, Sengupta, & Sharma, 2018). Resonant leadership involves a relationship-oriented approach to leading followers. The relationship between leadership and proactive behaviours has already been presented, but the importance of resonant leadership to trigger compassionate feelings at work is often missed (Hur et al., 2018). This is an important research gap that may inform managers to practice a certain type of leadership style in order to inculcate compassion among employees, which is regarded as pivotal in ensuring success (Hur et al., 2018).
Friendship at work is yet another important element to strengthen positive behaviours in the workplace. When working together, employees socialize with each other, which can lead to a caring attitude. But this has been missed in recently published studies (Methot, Lepine, Podsakoff, & Christian, 2016). Friendship at work is an important element to counter workplace bullying and related aggressions, also helping individuals to counter work-related stress and depression (Rai & Agarwal, 2018b). However, friendship at work is not very natural and requires some rationalization and strategies to inject this spirit among employees (Chang, Chou, Liou, & Tu, 2016). When employees become friends, their friendship can counter bullying and aggression and also strengthens their commitment to the company (Chao, 2018). However, whether friendship at work results in employees showing compassion towards each other is an important research question that remains unaddressed by contemporary researchers (Rai & Agarwal, 2018a). Since episodes of abuse at work are common (Kashif et al., 2017a), stronger emotional ties among colleagues have the potential to eliminate the negative effects of dark behaviours at work (Chiaburu & Harrison, 2008). This is where we believe workplace friendship has the potential to trigger compassion at work.
Finally, a serving culture is yet another organizational element that can trigger compassion and ultimately organizational commitment. A serving culture is defined as a culture of support, care and trustworthiness, where all the members of an organization are engaged in serving behaviours (Liden, Wayne, Liao, & Meuser, 2014). This is not limited to serving customers but also involves helping colleagues as well. Theoretically, a serving culture is categorized as an important facet of such work environments, where all the members prioritize and try to serve the needs and interests of others, supporting and helping each other (Nowak, 2019). When employees perceive organizational-related elements as positive being for their well-being and performance it results in positive work outcomes and has the potential to trigger commitment to the organization. However, even in the presence of such positive work environments, there is a noted lack of organizational commitment (Jang & Kandampully, 2018). Therefore, the relationship between a positive perception of the work environment and commitment requires some intervention. With this important gap in mind, we present compassion as a result of a perceived serving culture to strengthen its relationship with organizational commitment among employees. Compassion at work is a feeling among employees that triggers positive performance and behaviours at work (Hur et al., 2018).
There are three types of commitment: affective, continuance, and normative commitment (Allen & Meyer, 1990). Affective commitment is an emotional response to organizational efforts, while continuance commitment is where employees perform a cost-benefit analysis regarding whether to stay at or leave the company. Normative commitment is employees' perceptions of an "obligation to stay" with the organization (Meyer & Allen, 1997). Normative commitment is a balanced judgement among employees to stay with the company and is a consequence of the arousal of some inner feelings among them. This happens when they feel that staying with the company is a moral duty and that the organization's mission is compelling, motivating them to care about and help its members (McCormick & Donohue, 2019). Normative commitment among employees is a real challenge facing service organizations and managers are pressed to find ways to strengthen employee-organization relationships (Sharma, Kong, & Kingshott, 2016). Despite being a rational and important attitude, normative commitment is often overlooked, while affective commitment has been studied extensively (McCormick & Donohue, 2019). For instance, affective organizational commitment has been studied as a consequence of resonant leadership behaviour (Laschinger, Wong, Cummings, & Grau, 2014), workplace friendship (Morrison, 2009) and a serving culture (Liden et al., 2014), but these important organizational variables are...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃOCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
