INFLUENCE OF THE PROJECT MANAGER'S LEADERSHIP STYLES ON THE WORK ENGAGEMENT MEDIATED BY SENSE OF BELONGING

Abstract

This paper aimed to evaluate the influence of project managers' leadership styles on work engagement mediated by people's sense of belonging. The techniques of Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modelling were adopted to test the measurement and structural models. Mediation models were tested using Maximum Likelihood estimation handling Bootstrap with 5,000 resamples. The software adopted was Jasp 0.17.12 version. The results show that sense of belonging mediates the relationship between leadership and work engagement of the project team. Transformational leadership is the leadership style that promotes greater engagement, and the sense of belonging has a strong influence on this relationship. Results show the negative effect of transactional leadership, which is more focused on tasks, and this type of leadership reduces work engagement. Situational leadership did not obtain adequate results, and the ambiguity of situational leadership generates noise to understanding the direct and mediated effect. The sense of belonging acting as a mediator suggests that while transformational leadership has a positive and direct effect to work engagement, transactional has a negative effect on engagement behavior. Furthermore, the sense of belonging is a variable that can be seen as offering a substantial explanatory path for work engagement in a project context. Situational leaders must have the skills to accept and translate the ambiguous role to conduct members.