Spiritual Leadership and Job Engagement: The Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation

Abstract

Big data era has brought big challenge for firms in human resource management, especially in employees‘ emotion. Drawing on emotion regulation and leadership theories, this study tests the mediating roles of emotion regulation for cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in the relationship between spiritual leadership and job engagement. We made a field survey with 203 full-time employees to test our hypotheses. Empirical results show that the mediating effects of both cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in accounting for the relationship between spiritual leadership and job engagement. Our study is among the first to examine whether and why spiritual leadership predicts job engagement. Our study contributes to the literatures on job engagement and emotion regulation.