Is it happy to work with leaders viewing their work as a calling? Investigating mediators and a moderator on the relationship between leader calling and follower job satisfaction

Abstract

Although scholars have paid increasing attention to people with callings, relationships between leader's calling and follower's job attitudes have been understudied. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between leader calling and follower job satisfaction, and mediators and a moderator on the relationship. We hypothesized that leader calling would be positively related to follower job satisfaction via follower's perceived transformational leadership and occupational self-efficacy and that the two mediators would be positively related. As a boundary condition, we tested a moderating role of job crafting on the positive relationship between leader calling and follower occupational self-efficacy. To examine the hypotheses, we conducted two survey studies using a sample of 242 Korean working adults (Study 1)　and a sample of 221 American working adults in diverse industries (Study 2). We found a positive relationship between leader calling and follower job satisfaction (Study 1) and a significant mediating effect of transformational leadership on the relationship (Studies 1, 2). In both studies, follower occupational self-efficacy mediated the link between transformational leadership and follower job satisfaction rather than directly mediating the relationship between leader calling and follower job satisfaction. Also, when followers were highly involved in job crafting (Study 1) and cognitive crafting (Study 2), their occupational self-efficacy did not vary depending on the level of leader calling. Interestingly, the relationship between leader calling and follower occupational self-efficacy was negative when followers showed low levels of job crafting and cognitive crafting. We discuss the implications of these results, study limitations, and practical suggestions for future research.