The mediating effect of employee engagement on leadership styles and organizational commitment in Telekom Malaysia call centre

Highly committed to company’s overall business mission is particularly important for call centre, since agents’ behaviour and attitude has a direct impact on customer service. In employer-employee relationship, leadership plays an important role in people management in which understanding the significance of committed agents with effective leadership style enhance the success of call centre operating in today’s competitive environment. Nonetheless, previous studies discovered inconsistent results in organisational commitment and leadership styles relationship, particularly, transformational and transactional leadership styles. These inconsistencies led to a new line of research that shows how important it is to look at the effect of employee engagement as a potential mediating variable that could explain the relationship. Therefore, the present study investigated the relationships between leadership styles and organizational commitment in Telekom Malaysia call centre. Drawing upon the social exchange theory, the study also examined the mediating effect of employee engagement on the relationships between transformational leadership, transactional leadership and organizational commitment. Quantitative research design was adopted to collect the data and answer the research questions. Using a questionnaire survey, a total of 262 responses were collected from agents located in Kuala Lumpur. The data was analysed using PLS-SEM. The findings revealed that transactional leadership and employee engagement had positive influence on call centre agents’ organizational commitment, whereas, transformational leadership portrayed positive influence on employee engagement, but had no influence on organizational commitment. Employee engagement mediated the relationship between transactional leadership style and organizational commitment partially since transactional leadership style has both direct and indirect impacts on organisational commitment. Meanwhile, employee engagement fully mediated the relationship between transformational leadership style and organizational commitment. This study gives additional insight for call centre management to understand their agents better, to evaluate their existing policies and procedures, as well as to assist call centre leaders in influencing agents’ commitment and engagement.