Nurturing the soul at work: unveiling the impact of spiritual leadership, interpersonal justice and voice behavior on employee intention to stay

Nimitha Aboobaker and Zakkariya K.A.

International Journal of Ethics and Systems, 2023, vol. 40, issue 3, 539-560

Abstract: Purpose - This study investigates how the spiritual leadership style of a manager affects employees' intention to stay with the organization, taking into account the post-pandemic workplace and the expected economic downturn. Furthermore, this study aims to assess how employee voice behavior mediates the linkages between the spiritual leadership style and intention to stay and how this mediation is influenced by perceived interpersonal justice. Grounded on the self-determination theory of intrinsic motivation and social-exchange theory, this study seeks to advance the theoretical understanding of spiritual leadership and its associated outcomes. Design/methodology/approach - The descriptive study included 379 frontline employees in India's tourism and hospitality sector. Responses were collected from selected employees using the snowball sampling method and met strict inclusion criteria. Self-reporting questionnaires were used to collect data from the participants. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using IBM AMOS 21.0, and hypothesis testing and drawing inferences were carried out using path analytic procedures with PROCESS Macro 3.0. Findings - Consistent with the hypotheses presented in this paper, this study demonstrated a statistically significant indirect impact of spiritual leadership on employees' intention to stay with the organization, through indirect effects of employee voice behavior. Additionally, the conditional indirect effects of spiritual leadership on employees' intention to stay, mediated by voice behavior, were contingent upon the level of interpersonal justice as a moderator. Specifically, these effects were significant when the levels of interpersonal justice were low but not when they were high. Originality/value - This study makes significant strides in developing and testing a pioneering model that examines the association between spiritual leadership and employees’ intention to stay with the organization. This research explores explicitly how this relationship is influenced by perceived interpersonal justice and employee voice behavior. The results of this study emphasize the criticality of cultivating a culture that inspires constructive criticism and elucidates its potential advantages, effectively bridging a gap in the existing scholarly literature.

Keywords: Spiritual leadership style; Interpersonal justice; Employee voice behavior; Intention to stay; Tourism and hospitality; Self-determination theory; Intrinsic motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:ijoesp:ijoes-01-2023-0013

DOI: 10.1108/IJOES-01-2023-0013

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Ethics and Systems is currently edited by Prof Jacob Dahl Rendtorff

More articles in International Journal of Ethics and Systems from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().