Psychological Empowerment and Career Commitment: A Moderated Mediation Model of Trust in Leaders and Work Engagement from Social Exchange Theory

Abstract

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Psychological empowerment, work engagement, career commitment and trust in leaders arediscussed as resources to support the supervisors’ construction of an active and positive workenvironment. The social exchange process mentioned from social exchange theory afford thedirection to table out the relationships between the resources. Therefore, based on the socialexchange theory, the study aimed to explore the relationship between psychologicalempowerment and career commitment, the mediating effect of work engagement in the socialprocess between psychological empowerment and career commitment, and the moderatingeffect of trust in leaders in both research directions mentioned above. The thesis adopted aquantitative approach with an online questionnaire that focused on the Taiwanese participantsin Generation Y. The statistics conducted convenience and snowball sampling techniqueshaving 324 qualified participants. IBM SPSS and SPSS AMOS 20 were made use of thestatistical analysis. The findings from this study indicated that creating a work environmentwith high psychological empowerment is one effective method to amplify employee’s workengagement and career commitment. According to the social exchange process concepts, thepositive work experience built from employee’s work engagement plays an essential role inenhancing career commitment. Moreover, the findings showed that trust in leaders isinfluenced by psychological empowerment, which did not moderate the relationships in thisresearch. The research tried to advance the application for theoretical research on the socialexchange theory, also make the new direction for management as practical implication.