Leadership and Work Engagement Effectiveness within the Technology Era

Abstract

There is rising awareness regarding the entrepreneurship evolution within underdeveloped regions across the world and how it is affected by leadership initiatives regarding the work engagement of young entrepreneurs; an underlining series of studies should be performed, considering the job performance attributes specific to each given area. Entrepreneurship is a source of economic vitality that must be subject to correctly performed leadership initiatives that need to strive for training young entrepreneurs to understand and assess the strong and weak points of their business (idea) in order to successfully compete with larger organizations. The current study aims for explaining the relationship between leadership behavior (as transformational and transactional) and the underlying mechanism of work engagement (with a special focus on job resources). The current research used a convenience sample based on a voluntary response sampling method, engaging 508 young entrepreneurs from the NE region of Romania. Results prove that transformational leadership and work engagement are active contributors to the job performance. The current study is one of the few in the literature that enhances simultaneously both transformational and transactional leadership, along with work engagement as predictors of job performance, since previous research has only considered transformational leadership and disregarded the role of transactional leadership in followers’ job performance.