RESUMEN
The present work investigated fundamental mediating mechanisms (i.e., flow experience, organizational identification, and trust), underlining the impact of authentic leadership on employee resilience during the turbulent COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 901 frontline employees working in a construction engineering company in China participated in this study. They were asked to respond to a battery of questionnaires comprising Trust Scale (affective-based, cognitive-based, and competence-based), Flow Proneness Questionnaire (FPQ), Organizational Identification Scale, Authentic Leadership Questionnaire, and Employee Resilience Scale. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that: (1) Authentic leadership positively predicted employee resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic, directly and indirectly. (2) As for the indirect relationship, two parallel mediation effects and one chain mediation were detected: employees' flow at work and organizational identification respectively and dependently mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and employee resilience; trust and organizational identification played as a chain mediation role within authentic leadership-employee resilience association. The study provides empirical evidence for organizations' resilience-building and leadership training programs. Findings also contribute to the literature by facilitating flow intervention, promoting organizational identification and trust to enhance the effect of authentic leadership in promoting positive psychological functioning of employee resilience. Limitations with respect to future research directions were also outlined.
RESUMEN
Authentic leadership is essential for predicting employee resilience. However, despite fruitful findings, more adapted models of authentic leadership - employee resilience based on empirical findings can serve as a guide to understand the complex mediators and moderators in different industries such as in construction engineering project organizations during the turbulent pandemic. This study, therefore, based on the organizational identification theory and flow theory through the lens of positive organizational psychology, aims to disentangle the authentic leadership-employee resilience association by investigating their underlying mechanism and their boundary condition. To test our hypothetical model, we applied a cross-sectional design with data collected from a large sample of 884 employees from a big enterprise in China. Findings from confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling analysis, and Hayes's conditional process model indicated that: authentic leadership positively predicted employee resilience through the partial mediation effect of organizational identification, and such a mediation model was moderated by the experience of flow. In other words, flow moderated the relationships between authentic leadership, organizational identification, and employee resilience. Findings provide evidence for cultivating leaders' authenticity in promoting their subordinates' resilience; findings also highlight the significance of organizational identification in bridging authentic leadership and employee resilience and the essential role of flow experience in supporting the relationships mentioned above.