1. Purpose of Research and Framework
In order to actively deal with the environmental changes in public welfare and efficiently manage social welfare agencies, it is important to understand the emotional intelligence of employees. At the same time, i...
1. Purpose of Research and Framework
In order to actively deal with the environmental changes in public welfare and efficiently manage social welfare agencies, it is important to understand the emotional intelligence of employees. At the same time, it is necessary to meet their needs and to reach for reciprocal goals between employees and organizations. From this perspective, the concept of emotional leadership and employee empowerment has received a great deal of attention in the current research. Emotional leadership is about recognizing the emotional intelligence of employees to incorporate their expected needs in order to find reciprocal goals and lead employees. Empowerment is related to improving individual capability or enhancing responsibility of employees by fostering job and organizational commitment along with enabling the employees to adapt to environmental changes.
Building on this trend, this research investigates how emotional leadership of a head (leader) in a social welfare agency affects the employees' organizational effectiveness (organizational commitment & job satisfaction) and empowerment. Empowerment, considered to be an important factor of measuring organizational task performance, has been put to the test as a mediator between emotional leadership and organizational effectiveness.
The purpose of this research is as follow: 1) Testing how emotional leadership affects organizational effectiveness in a social welfare agency; 2) Revealing the relationship between emotional leadership of a head in a social welfare agency and empowerment in order to offer an ideal type of leadership that could maximize the adoption of empowerment practices; and 3) Examining the mediating role of empowerment between emotional leadership and organizational effectiveness (organizational commitment & job satisfaction).
Thus the main interest of this research focuses on emotional leadership of heads in social welfare agencies. The scope and the method of the research are presented as follows : first, the time span is from May 1, 2012 to May 25, 2012 and the special scope is the employees in social welfare agencies in the metropolitan city of Daegu and Gyeongsangbuk
-Do. Second, the method of the research is a combination of both a literature review and an empirical survey analysis. In the literature review section, both Korea and global researches have been reviewed to systematically summarize the concepts of emotional leadership, empowerment, and organizational effectiveness. Specifically, Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee's (2002) work is used for analyzing emotional leadership. Also, Speritzer's (1995) theory for empowerment, Meyer & Allen's (1990) research for explaining organizational commitment, and lastly, Quinn & Staine's (1979) theory for job satisfaction were used for the literature review and the survey questionnaire development.
The independent variable of this study is emotional leadership composed of self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. The dependent variables are organizational commitment (affective, continuance, & normative commitment) and job satisfaction. Empowerment (meaningfulness, competence, self-determination, impact) was used as a mediating variable. The statistical analysis was conducted by using the SPSS WIN version 20.0 to test the significance of the relationships. Based on the theoretical discussion, how emotional leadership affects empowerment and organizational effectiveness is presented in Figure 1.
<Figure 1> Research Model
2. Results and Implications
First, emotional leadership of a head in a social welfare agency was found to have a positive impact on organizational effectiveness. Such a result could mean that in order to improve organizational effectiveness, the exercise of emotional leadership is necessary for the head of the social welfare agency. It also implies that training for the leaders of social welfare agency is necessary.
Second, among the sub-dimensional variables of emotional leadership, social capability (social awareness, relationship management) was the only sub-dimensional variable that positively influenced empowerment.
Third, empowerment was found to have a positive impact on organizational effectiveness. The statistical result showed that empowerment partially affects the sub-dimensional variables of organizational effectiveness, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. In addition, meaningfulness (sub-dimensional variable of empowerment) was discovered to have a strong influence on organizational commitment and job satisfaction.
Fourth, empowerment, as a mediating variable, was discovered to have a positive impact. In other words, it mediates the relationships between both sub-dimensional variables of organizational effectiveness (organizational commitment & job satisfaction).
Based on these findings, several propositions are developed including the ability of social awareness, relationship management, and self-awareness strongly impacting the increase of organizational effectiveness. In emotional leadership, it would be worthy to actively pay attention to employee's emotional intelligence in order to have employees feel organizational involvement and commitment which ultimately makes them successfully attain their task goals. Accordingly, emotional leadership that integrates social awareness, relationship management, and self-awareness should be encouraged. I suggest that the research about emotional leadership of a head in a social welfare agency should be more expanded.
Another proposition includes leaders of social welfare agencies recognizing the importance of empowering their employees while they exercise their emotional leadership. Furthermore, customized empowerment practices for various types of social agencies may be established.
A further proposition suggests that leaders need to implement empowerment strategies in their organizations. The researcher recommends that leaders should encourage participation regardless of position in attempt to increase organizational effectiveness. To do so, the leaders could provide channels for discussion with the employees and actually assign more responsibility and discretion to the employees so that they can voluntarily participate, enhancing organizational effectiveness.
Lastly, for the sake of social welfare, education for emotional intelligence and leadership needs to be offered to leaders and employees in social welfare organizations. Continuous training improves the emotional intelligence of the leaders, and then it can better the attitude and behavior of employees. In addition, the training of emotional leadership and intelligence could mitigate the negative perspective of employees in their organizations, leading to increase organizational effectiveness.