How Instrumental Leadership Promotes Affective Commitment: Social Skills as Mediator

Abstract

Employee-organization linkages have been the subject of considerable scholarly and managerial attention.The findings of this research study provide empirical evidence that instrumental leadership attributes pre-dict affective commitment among employees in their organizations. More specifically, based on theirexpertise and environmental knowledge, instrumental leaders endorse attributes that help followersadhere to the organization’s vision through providing timely feedback and facilitating tasks. Instrumentalleadership thus promotes a positive workplace in which affective commitment is encouraged. The sampleincluded 226 followers from a major telecom company in Morocco. Employees reported their levels ofaffective commitment, completed the Social Skills Inventory, and rated their supervisor’s instrumentalleadership. Results suggest that instrumental leadership may play a role in building employees’ affectivecommitment and that more socially skilled employees may be more likely to develop healthy leader-follower relationships, resulting in affective commitment to the organization as a whole.