Authentic Leadership and Employees’ Commitment to Organizational Change with Mediating Role of Trust: The Case of Selected Public Federal Organizations in Addis Ababa

Abstract

Prevalence of authentic leadership, trust and employees’ commitment are considered as vital elements for a healthy and successful sailing of the 21 century organizations. The purpose of this study was to find out the effect of prevalence of authentic leadership (PAL) on employees’ commitment to organizational change (ECOC) with a mediating role of employees’ trust in leadership (ETL). To that end, an explanatory research design with quantitative approach was used.  Data were collected from 400 employees of four selected federal organizations. Data analysis was done using mean, logistic regression and MANOVA from the SPSS software version 21. Findings of the analysis revealed that authentic leadership has a statistically significant positive effect on employees’ commitment (R2=.038; b=.197; p=.003), whereas, its effect through the mediation of trust is trivial and statistically insignificant (R2=.030;b=.049;p=.153). Besides, the effect of PALon ETL was found to be negative and statistically significant (-.245; p=.014). Moreover, the MANOVA test results revealed that the studied organizations do not have statistically significant difference in the levels of their PAL (p=.273) and ECOC (p=.696). Nonetheless, there is statistically significant difference in the studied organizations’ level of ETL (p=.000). Based on the above findings and reference to relevant literature, the researcher concluded that, the nature of leadership in the studied organizations is dominated by transactional leadership style; that was why the relationship between authentic leadership and trust is found to be negative and statistically significant. Finally, it is recommended that public organizations should give special emphasis to development and practice of authentic leadership qualities which could make employees’ develop embedded trust and exert extra effort to ensure success of their organizations.