An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Transformational Leadership, Empowerment and Organizational Commitment

Organizational leadership literature highlights that transformational leadership has four salient features: intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, individualized influenced attributed, and individualized influence behavior. The ability of leaders to properly implement this leadership style may have a significant impact on organizational commitment. More importantly, recent studies in this area reveal that effect of transformational leadership style on organizational commitment is indirectly affected by empowerment. The nature of this relationship is interesting, but little is known about the mediating effect of empowerment in organizational leadership literature. Therefore, this study was conducted to examine the influence of empowerment in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment using a sample of 118 usable questionnaires gathered from employees who have worked in one US subsidiary firm in East Malaysia, Malaysia. The results of exploratory factor analysis confirmed that the measurement scales used in this study satisfactorily met the standards of validity and reliability analyses. Further, the outcomes of Stepwise Regression analysis showed that the relationship between empowerment and transformational leadership positively and significantly correlated with the organizational commitment. Statistically, this result confirms that empowerment acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment in the organizational sample. In addition, discussion, implications and conclusion are elaborated.