The mediating role of empowerment, performance feedback and goal difficulty in the relationship between transformational leadership and employee attitudes in South Africa’s direct-selling sector

Abstract

Orientation: The role of dispositional factors in explaining the mechanism by which transformational leadership impacts employee attitudes is over-emphasised, sometimes at the expense of utilising contextual variables to explain the relationship between leadership and employee attitudes.
Research purpose: The study examined the indirect roles of empowerment, performance feedback and goal difficulty in the relationship between transformational leadership, job satisfaction and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB).
Motivation for the study: There is a lack of empirical research investigating the relationships among transformational leadership, job satisfaction and OCB, as well as the indirect roles of empowerment, performance feedback and goal difficulty in these relationships.
Research approach/design and method: Following a positivist paradigm and quantitative approach, managers completed questionnaires (N = 222), and the data were analysed using SmartPLS 4.
Main findings: Transformational leadership has a positive and statistically significant effect on empowerment, performance feedback and goal difficulty. Empowerment and performance feedback also positively and significantly affect job satisfaction and OCB. Moreover, the indirect effects of the relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction and OCB were confirmed.
Practical/managerial implications: Poor direct links between transformational leadership and employee attitudes suggest that direct-selling organisations should focus less on promoting transformational leadership as a broad leadership style and instead on performance feedback and empowerment, which could translate into increased job satisfaction and OCB.
Contribution/value-add: This study confirms the basic assumptions of social exchange theory (SET) and highlights contextual mechanisms strengthening the influence of transformational leadership in promoting job satisfaction and OCB in the micro-franchise context.