The moderating role of political skill in the relationships between social power, leader-member exchange and job satisfaction: A research in banking sector

The purpose of this study is to investigate the hypothesized relationship between leader power sources and leader-member exchange, and to test for the moderating role of political skill in this relationship. Besides, the effects of leader power sources, leader-member exchange and political skill on bank employees' levels of job satisfaction is researched. To that end, a survey study was conducted on a sample of 389 commercial bank employees of non-managerial positions working in Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir, Malatya, Manisa and Adana provinces. Data were collected through quota sampling and the questionnaire form consisted of previously validated research scales and demographic variables. A correlational research design was adopted and the recruited cross-sectional data were analyzed through IBM SPSS 20.0 and Amos 22. Following the reliability analyses on the research scales, a confirmatory factor analysis was performed. The correlations between the resulting scales and sub-scales were investigated to determine the degree of covariance among the study variables and regression analyses were conducted to designate how much of the variance in dependent variables was explained by the independent variables within the framework of this study's research model. In addition, the existence of any variance in scale mean scores that was based on demographic variables was investigated through comparison tests. The correlation analysis demonstrates that leaders' soft power sources are more robustly correlated with leader-member exchange and its sub-scales than leaders' harsh power sources. The participants with higher levels of political skill have higher exchange relationships with their leaders. Moreover, there is a positively significant relationship between leader-member exchange and job satisfaction, and leaders' soft power sources lead to higher levels of job satisfaction than leaders' harsh power sources. The hierarchical regression analysis shows that political skill plays a moderating role in the relationship between leaders' soft power sources and leader-member exchange. The regression model incorporating the effects of leader power sources, leader-member exchange and political skill on employee job satisfaction has a 42% explanatory power. According to the analyses investigating the role of demographic variables on research scales, age, education, position, managerial level of the immediate superior, experience and the size of the business unit are consequential in terms of some of the scale mean scores. Participant gender does not have any significant effect on scale means. The findings of the study are anchored on relevant theory and discussed with a view to practical implications.