Transformational Leadership and Employee Engagement: Empirical Evidence in the Employment Sector for the Plywood Industry in Indonesia

Abstract

2020; Li et al., 2018). A leadership style that stresses innovative communication, development, work distribution, and autonomy might help to eliminate workplace friction (Sahu et al., 2017). Among the several leadership styles that have been established, transformational leadership appears to fulfill the needs of innovative leaders. Transformational leadership is implicated in the development in employee engagement, as revealed by numerous latest researches showing that transformational Abstract: Employee engagement aids the organization's achievement of its objectives. Among HR professionals and academics, employee engagement has become a hot topic, with some saying that it is a critical driver of business success. Meanwhile, engaged employees love their work more and turn that pleasure into more productive actions. Consequently, we propose this new concept. This research is explanatory research with a quantitative approach to interpret the influence of transformational leadership on employee engagement and explain the dimensions of transformational leadership. The investigation was carried out in the plywood industry's labor supply sector, on the large island of South Kalimantan in Indonesia. The population is 4,200 workers with 343 workers involved in the sample. Simple linear regression was used to analyze the data using SPSS Version 23 for Windows. The findings from the regression support the 5 hypotheses. Transformational leadership has a significant positive effect on employee engagement. Likewise, the 4 dimensions of transformational leadership (ideal influence, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and individual considerations) have a significant positive effect on employee engagement. This study examines the impact of transformational leadership on employee engagement. Next, it focuses on the impact of each dimension on employee involvement in the labor supply sector of the plywood industry on the large island of South Kalimantan in Indonesia. The study revealed that transformational leadership, and each of its dimensions (i.e., idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, motivational inspiration, and individual consideration) had a significant positive effect on employee engagement. The findings suggest that organizations can increase employee engagement by developing transformational leaders in the context of the plywood industry.