The Role of Leadership Styles in Shaping Workplace Incivility: The Mediating Role of Job Dissatisfaction and the Moderating Role of Citizenship Pressure

Abstract

Abstract: The paper examines the implications that leadership styles have on workplace incivility in the Pakistani banking industry that presents that job dissatisfaction is the mediating variable to this issue with citizenship pressure as the moderating variable. The study concentrates on the effects of transactional and empowering leadership on the uncivil behaviors of employees; the study tries to explain the psychological and contextual processes that mediate the relationships. A sample of middle level employees that comprised of branch officers, relationship managers and operational managers of commercial banks in Pakistan was used. Convenience sampling was used to collect data among 313 respondents through a cross-sectional survey that is quantitative. The findings demonstrate that empowering leadership has a high degree of job dissatisfaction as compared to transactional which has a statistically significant effect on job dissatisfaction. Workplace incivility has close relations with job dissatisfaction; i.e. dissatisfied employees tend to behave uncivilly. Additionally, job dissatisfaction mediates the interaction of empowering leadership and workplace incivility, but not the relationship between transactional leadership and incivility. Other results of the study were that citizenship pressure does not moderate the relationship between job dissatisfaction and workplace incivility. Through these findings, the research proposes that banks should come up with leadership programs that encourage empowering leadership but balance between employee autonomy and corporate support. The human resource policies must also be aimed at tracking employee satisfaction and alleviating job stress so as to prevent workplace incivility.