Mediating Role of the Positive Psychological Capital on the Relation between the Authentic Leadership Style and Employees’ Work Engagement: An Applied Study on Hospitality Industry

The most valuable and unique resource that the organizations have under today's conditions is the human resources. The positive psychology perspective, trying to understand the human resource in all its parts that brings hope, self-efficacy, optimism, and resilience features into the forefront draws attention to utilize this resource in the most effective way. Moreover, the leadership perspectives that discover the positive psychological capital (PsyCap) elements and contribute to the employees' development becomes more important in the employees' work engagement. In this context, this study aims at determining the relation between the authentic leadership and employees' work engagement and mediating role of the PsyCap on this relationship. The study was carried out with 462 employees working at 4 and 5 star hotels in the cities in the Central and Eastern Black Sea regions in Turkey. Validity of the study's scales was evaluated by explanatory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and the relations between the variables that comprise the research design were evaluated by the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Findings reveal that, the authentic leadership has a positive effect on both work engagement and PsyCap and PsyCap has a positive effect on the work engagement. Moreover, it is determined that the PsyCap has a partial mediating role in the authentic leadership's effect on the work engagement. Bootstrap test results also show that the mediating role of the PsyCap determined is significant. As a result, within the framework of the research variables, it can be stated that authentic leaders affect employees' work engagement directly with their leadership characteristics and partially by supporting and developing employees' PsyCap elements