The moderating role of subordinates' personality in the relationship between military leadership and subordinates' attitudes and behaviors

Leadership styles and how leaders approach to their subordinates play an important role in achieving organizational goals. Military is an example where leadership matters. Healthy and positive leader-subordinate relationship and leadership behaviors in the military effect attitudes and behaviors of subordinates. By doing so, these contribute to carrying out tasks and achieving organizational goals. Military Leadership Scale (MLS) is one of the recent scales developed for the military sample. Military Leadership can be defined as "process of directing, development and influencing the subordinates towards achieving the tasks by showing them target and direction". This study aims to test the validity of Military Leadership Scale and investigate the effect of military leadership on the attitudes and behaviors of subordinates and moderating role of subordinate personality traits in leader-subordinate relationship. The theoretical basis of this study relies on Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources Theory. According to theory; employee's personal characteristics can play an important role in strengthening positive or negative effects of military leadership on the employee outputs. In this study, firstly, in order to confirm and test the validity of military leadership scale's factorial structure; through the data gathered from 276 personnel by intranet, confirmatory factor analysis was made, and it was seen that three-factorial-structure confirmed as the original. Afterwards, in order to examine the relationship between variables, an examination was done on a sample of 390 officer, non commissioned officer and specialized sergeant who work at four different units of the Land Forces Command. On this research, leaders' behaviors were measured with leadership scale; subordinates' behaviors were measured with task performance scale and organizational citizenship scale; subordinates' attitudes were measured with satisfaction with leader scale and subjective well-being scale; subordinates' personality was measured with five factor personality scale. In order to reduce common method variance; independent variable data and moderating variable data were collected at the first phase, dependent variables data were collected at the second phase approximately one month later. In order to reduce one source bias and social desirability, leaders' military leadership was gathered from subordinates, subordinates' behaviors were gathered from leaders. Reliability analysis results showed that, reliability values (Cronbach Alpha) of the scales were above .70, and they were reliable. Correlation analysis results showed that all three dimensions of military leadership scale are in a relationship with subordinates' task performance, satisfaction with leaders and subjective well-beings. Regression analysis showed that leaders' interest to personnel positively effects subordinates' task performance and satisfaction with leader, and leaders' awareness positively effects subordinates' satisfaction with leaders. Ayrıca, it was found that subordinates' conscientiousness effects task performance and subjective well-beings; extraversion effects subjective well-beings; conscientiousness and openness effect satisfaction with leader; neuroticism effects subjective well-beings. Analysis made to determine moderating role of subordinates' personality characteristics illustrated that their openness has a moderating role between interest to personnel and awareness and satisfaction with leader relationship. Keyword : Military leadership, task performance, satisfaction from leader, organizational citizenship behavior, subjective well-being, five-factor personality.