You can't make me! The role of self-leadership in enhancing organizational commitment and work engagement

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of self-leadership in enhancing work engagement through the mediating mechanisms of affective, normative and continuance organizational commitment.

Data collected from 258 transportation workers were examined in a parallel mediation model in PROCESS.

The results of these analyses suggest that the positive relationship between self-leadership and work engagement is partially mediated by affective commitment and normative commitment, but not by continuance commitment.

The findings imply that organizational decision makers should implement practices designed to increase self-leadership in the workplace and enhance employee work engagement. These practices include empowering leadership, recruitment and selection of self-leading employees, and self-leadership training interventions. The study was subject to limitations common to attitudinal survey research.

This study responds calls to explore the mediating mechanisms through which self-leadership affects organizational outcomes and helps explain why self-leadership affects employee work engagement.