Leadership and Team Values Shape Employee Engagement: Test of a Multilevel Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

The current research scrutinized how a leader’s communication and team value orientations interactively relate to employee engagement. The proposed model hypothesized that the impact of leadership on engagement would be mediated by followers’ trust toward a leader and this leadership-trust-engagement linkage would be moderated by team power distance and collectivism; in addition, employee voice behavior was examined as a behavioral manifestation of engagement. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling analyses with the data collected at a large electronics company in Japan (n = 638 members and 68 team leaders) revealed that transformational leadership was positively associated with employee trust and engagement when team power distance and collectivism were high, but not when those team values were low. Transactional leadership had negative effects on trust and engagement, regardless of team values. Finally, engagement was strongly positively associated with employee voice behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.