The Effect of Supervisor’s Empowering Leadership on Office Worker’s Job Embeddedness: Focusing on the Mediating Roles of Affect-Based Trust and Job Crafting

Retaining competent workers is critical since it impacts on continuity of work, recruitment and training costs, and other aspects of organizational effectiveness. This study aims to identify key factors that can prevent office workers from leaving their organization and job, and to complement the limitations of turnover research. Specifically, the study aims to explore the antecedents of job satisfaction, which can promote employee retention and prevent turnover, by analyzing the structural relationships among variables. The study surveyed 350 office workers with more than one year of tenure using an online questionnaire and analyzed the structural relationships among variables using structural equation modeling. The results showed that empowering leadership did not have a direct impact on job satisfaction, but had an indirect positive impact through psychological trust and voice. Psychological trust had a positive direct and indirect impact on job satisfaction and voice, while voice had the largest positive direct impact on job satisfaction. Additionally, both psychological trust and voice had a mediating effect between empowering leadership and job satisfaction, and their double mediation effect was also statistically significant. Based on these results, the study provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of empowering leadership and suggests practical implications for both academic and organizational settings.