THE IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON JOB STRESS AND TURNOVER INTENTION TAIWAN INSURANCE INDUSTRY AS AN EXAMPLE

University Degree Business and Administrative studies

THE IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON JOB STRESS AND TURNOVER INTENTION – TAIWAN INSURANCE INDUSTRY AS AN EXAMPLE

ABSTRACT

For recent years, Taiwan has stepped into an aging society. Life insurance and retirement planning which have quite a lot to do with insurance industry are questions of interest. The insurance industry focuses on close contact among clients, sales people and managers. That is a human-oriented industry, for which the experienced leaders inspire the sales people through continuous training and encouragement and lead them by vision. Therefore, leader’s leadership type is the critical factor for the success of the organization. This research explores the relationships among leader’s leadership style, subordinate’s personality characteristic, and job stress and turnover intention. We also identify the role of the variable of personality characteristic and job stress respectively.

We use convenient sampling method to collect data. In pretest, 50 copies of questionnaires are sent to employees of M insurance company, for which 46 valid ones are returned, And then, a total of 220 copies of questionnaires are sent out, of which 176 returned questionnaires are valid. The effective response rate is at 80%.

We adopt SPSS to do data analysis and draw conclusions as follows:(1) Leadership style has significant influence on job stress; (2) Job stress has positive relationship with turnover intention; (3) Leadership style has negative influence of turnover intention; (4) Personality characteristic has no moderating effect on the relationship between leadership style and job stress; (5) Personality characteristic brings no moderating effect on the relationship between job stress and turnover intention; (6) Job stress has mediation effect on the relationship between leadership style and turnover intention.

Keywords：Leadership Style, Job Stress, Personality Characteristic, Turnover Intention.

INTRODUCTION

For recent years, Taiwan has stepped into an aging society. Life insurance and retirement planning that have quite a lot to do with insurance are questions of interest. The insurance industry focuses on close contact and interaction among clients, sales people and managers. That is a human-oriented industry, for which the experienced leaders inspire the sales people through continuous training and encouragement and lead them to work hard to achieve goals by vision. The leader’s leadership type plays an important role in achievementing performance t of the organization. The leader’s ability to adapt to internal and external environment changes and lead a group of cordial subordinates to work together is the key to success. Thus, this research explores the relationships among the leader’s leadership style and the subordinate’s personality characteristic, job stress and turnover intention. This research also studies the role of the variable of personality characteristic and job stress respectively and gives advices to managers to lower the turnover rate in the life insurance industry. The specific research objectives are listed as follows: (1). to explore the influence of leadership style on the subordinate’s job stress; (2). to explore the influence of job stress on turnover intention; (3). to explore the influence of different leadership style on the turnover intention; (4). to explore the moderating role of personality characteristic on leadership style and job stress respectively; (5). to explore the mediating effect of personality characteristic and job stress respectively.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Leadership Style

The practice and academic circles agree that leadership is really an important subject in the field of organizational behavior. Leadership is one with the most dynamic effects during individual and organizational interaction. In other words, whether a management is able to execute “collaborated effort” depends on leadership capability. The excellent leader not only inspires subordinate’s potential to enhance efficiency and also meets their requirements in the process of achieving organizational goals. Stogdill(1957) defined leadership as the individual behavior to guide a group to achieve the common target. In latter days, Richards & Engle (1986) defined leadership as about establishment of vision, value and creation of environment so that the objective can be accomplished. Definitions on leadership defined by selected authors were summarized into table 1.

Table 1 Definition of Leadership

After reviewing studies on leadership theory conducted in the past, it is generally divided into four periods:

(1). Traits theory in 1930s--- It focuses on the innate leadership qualities and competence. These innate qualities are not found in others. The so-called quality can be divided into physiological and mental aspects. The physiological aspect includes: height, weight, looks, and vigor while the mental aspect includes intelligence, confidence, and aggressiveness etc. Stogdill (1948) proposed twelve leadership related studies and was considered as representative of this period.

(2). Behavioral theory from late 1940s to late 1960s--- It believes that a leader will be able to achieve ideal organizational efficiency if he demonstrates effective leadership behaviors. These leadership behaviors may be trained or learned through experience. Actual behavior or leadership styles are emphasized. Representative research is conducted in Ohio State University. Ohio State University proposed “consideration“ and “initiating structure” of leadership behaviors. Consideration is a behavior that focuses on strengthening relationship with subordinates based on their needs and perceptions, while “initiating structure” is a behavior that focuses on subordinate performance in goal accomplishment.
(3). Contingency theory in late 1960s--- This theory states that there is no set of optimum leadership model in this world and that it depends on the situation encountered. Situational leadership theory began its development subsequently. It states that leaders need to adopt the most optimum leadership style based on different organizational situations. Among which, Fiedler’s contingency theory (1967) is most well-known.

(4). Contemporary leadership theory since 1970s---The viewpoint of contemporary leadership theory states that leadership is a type of interactive process with the environment. Bass & Avolio (1990) proposed transactional leadership and transformation leadership:(1)transactional leadership---encouraging subordinates through incentive establishment. In other words, incentive elicits work performance. Transactional leadership is the basis for most leadership theories. It focuses on the exchange relationship between the leader and the subordinate (Fry, 2003；Northouse, 2001); (2) transformation leadership---to enhance staff’s trust and respect for leader by altering intrinsic work value and faith of staff at the same time in order to elicit work capabilities. Because “charisma” ...

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Job Stress

Job stress means improper occupational stress or burden that badly affects the psychological and physical condition of the worker himself (Kroes, 1974). Peng (1998) states that psychological stress is neither stimulus nor reaction but a handling method or relationship; it is the interaction between the individual and the environment, which gains or consumes resources of human behavior and endangers the individual health. When the individual feels job stress, it usually comes along with following symptoms:(1) psychological aspect--- passive, disconsolate, anxious and anger; (2) physical aspect--- imbalance incretion, headache, sleepless and disturbed; (3) behavioral aspect--- change of living behavior, decrease of job involvement, absence from work, and turnover. The definitions of various authors were summarized in table 2.

Table 2 Definition of Job Stress

Personality Charateristics

Personality characteristic means one’s psychological and physical phenomenon. At different time and condition, it adapts to different environment by unique behavioral mode and thinking method. Friedman & Rosenman (1959) categorize personality characteristics into type A and B. Type A shows exuberant ambition and aggression. Type B has more patience and pays less attention to competition and sense of achievement.

Definitions of personality characteristic were summarized as shown into table 3.

Table 3 Definitions of Personality Characteristic

Turnover Intention

Turnover intention means the subjective perception of the organizational member to quite the current job for other opportunity (Fan, 1978). Table 4 showed definitions of turnover intention defined by various authors.

Table 4 Definition of Turnover Intention

Empirical Studies

The verification researches made by the domestic and foreign scholars on leadership, job stress, personality characteristic and turnover intention are described as follows:(1)in research of leader behavior and job stress, Fleishman (1964) found that consideration in the leader behavior has negative connection with the job stress, while the initiating structure is positively connected with job stress; (2) in research of leader behavior and turnover intention, Fleishman & Harris (1962) in the study of the influence of various leadership types on turnover rate and complaint rate found that consideration for the subordinates is negatively connected with the turnover, while the initiating structure is positively connected with turnover; (3) in research of job stress and turnover intention, Parasuraman & Alutto (1984) in the research on 217 employees at the food manufacturing company indicated that job stress had positive connection with turnover intention;(4) in research of personality characteristics and job stress, Chang (1998) chose employees of Taiwan Sugar Company as research subject and indicated that those with type A personality characteristic had higher perception of job stress and shew more physical and psychological discomfort reactions;(5) in research of personality characteristics and turnover intention, Chang (2003) released 260 questionnaires to 11 schools and revealed that personality characteristics had no significant impact on turnover intention. The relevant empirical researches were listed in table 5.

Table 5 Empirical Research

RESEARCH METHOD

Research Framwork

Insurance is human-oriented business. The service it offers is intangible and the services of competitors are highly similar, for which the salespeople must face keen competition and challenge from competitors. The turnover rate of life insurance salesmen keeps high because of such job compensation without base pay and suffering from heavy stress that is hard to be accepted by the people.

The experienced leader is well aware of this fact and keeps training, assisting and inspiring the sales personnel. Therefore, the leader’s leadership style is very important for the performance achievement of organization. Therefore, we have a great interest in exploring the relationships among leadership style, personality characteristic, job stress and turnover intention. This research also tries to identify the role of variable for personality characteristic and job stress respectively. Framework of this research is shown as Figure1.

Fig 1 Research framework

Research Hypotheses

If the organization intends to keep outperforming in the violently competitive environment, leadership is the most influential factor. The objective of this research is to explore the relationships among leadership style and salespeople job stress and turnover intention and the role of personality characteristic and job stress respectively. We learn from the above literatures that the leader’s leadership style has significant influence on the staff’s job stress and turnover intention. Thus, this research develops following hypothesis based on the research framework:

Different leadership style has different impact on the subordinate’s work willingness. The leader’s ability to adapt to internal and external environmental change and lead a group of cordial subordinates fighting together is one of the keys to success. Hsu (1986) conducts research on 222 operators of China Steel Company in Kaohsiung on the relationship among leader’s personality characteristic, the leader behavior, the staff’s job stress and job satisfaction. The research indicated that consideration leadership had significantly negative connection with job stress, but the initiating structure positively connected with job stress, the leadership style and job stress are negatively connected. Hence, we develop hypotheses as below:

H1 Leadership style has significant influence on job stress

H1a Transformational leadership has negative influence on job stress

H1b Transactional leadership has positive influence on job stress

Job stress is usually generated along with change of productivity such as passive job involvement, indifference to colleagues, envy and suspicion, efficiency drop, job absence, turnover, etc. Parasuraman & Alutto (1984) studied 217 employees of food manufacturing company and found that job stress had positive connection with turnover intention. Therefore, we propose the hypothesis as follows.

H2 Job stress has positive influence on turnover intention.

Fleishman & Harris (1962) conducted research on relationships among leadership style, turnover rate and complaint rate. The research result reveals that consideration leadership style (transformational) has apparently negative connection with turnover, while initiating structure (transactional) is positively connected with turnover. Therefore, we develop hypotheses as below:

H3 Leadership style has significant influence on turnover intention.

H3a Transformational leadership has negative influence on turnover intention.

H3b Transactional leadership has positive influence on turnover intention.

Wang (1990) made his research on the subject of connection among employee with A-type personality characteristic, leader’s leadership style, and employee’s job stress” and found that people with A-type personality characteristic perceive more job stress than those with B-type, while ones with B-type feel apparently more job stress at low self-respect post than those of A-type. Thus, hypotheses are developed as follows.

H4 Personality characteristic has moderating effect on the relationship between leadership style and job stress.

H5 Personality characteristic has moderating effect on the relationship between job stress and turnover intention.

H6 Job stress has mediation effect on the relationship between leadership style and turnover intention.

Research Design

According to the purpose of the paper, we develop structural questionnaire that revised from other’s inventory. A 5-likert scale is used. The measurement of constructs is shown in table 6.

Table 6 Measurement of Constructs

This research chooses sales personnel of local insurance companies as the subject and collects data by convenient sampling method. The survey instrument was initially pre-tested by 50 employees of M insurance company for content, readability, and ambiguity. Based on results of the pretest, minor changes were made to select questionnaire items, and the instrument were sent to 220 employees of insurance companies, for which 176 returned mailings are valid, effective response rate at 80%.

After collecting the valid questionnaires, SPSS is used to do data analysis.

DATA ANALYSIS

Sample Profile

Table 7 Basic Statistics of Samples

After collecting the valid questionnaires, we provide demographic information first and then SPSS is used to do data analysis. Descriptive statistics analysis (frequency allocation and percentage analysis) is used to display the profile of samples. Basic statistics of samples is showed as table 7.

Statistical Analysis

This research starts with factor analysis of leadership style and then moves to reliability analysis and regression analysis.

Leadership style construct comprises of 33 measurement items. The main components analysis with the variant of orthogonal notation is used to extract the factor. Two factors are extracted and factor’s loading is over 0.7 and the accumulative explained variation is at 67.19%. These two factors are named as transformational leadership and transactional leadership. After factor analysis, 25 items are selected.

Reliability means accuracy of measurement tool. This research adopts Cronbach's α to verify the internal consistency. Roberts & Wortzel (1979) state that Cronbach's α lying in 0.79 to 0.96 means high reliability. For the reliability analysis done by this research, Cronbach's α of leadership style ＝0.962, of which Cronbach's α for transformational leadership ＝0.975, Cronbach’s α for transactional leadership ＝0.833。Cronbach's α of job stress ＝0.891, Cronbach's α of personality characteristic ＝0.882, Cronbach's α of turnover intention ＝0.864. As shown in table 8, reliability of each construct is over 0.8, which means this research is highly reliable and trustworthy.

Table 8 Cronbach's α of Constructs

This paper uses regression analysis to study the relationships between predictive variable and criterion variable.

Regression analysis result as shown in table 9 indicates that leadership style has significant connection with job stress. Therefore, the hypothesis H1 is supported. Furthermore leadership style is divided into transformational style and transactional style to do separately analysis. The result reveals that transformational leadership is negatively connected with job stress. H1a is therefore supported as shown in table 10. The positive influence of transactional leadership on job stress is not significant, so H1b is not supported as shown in table 11.

Table 9 Regression of Leadership Style on Job Stress

Table 10 Regression of Transformational Leadership on Job Stress

Table 11 Regression of Transactional Leadership on Job Stress Analysis

Regression analysis of job stress on turnover intention as shown in table 12 indicates that job stress has positive relationship with turnover intention, H2 is supported. It means that the more job stress, the more turnover intention.

Table 12 Regression of Job Stress on Turnover Intention

Regression of leadership style on turnover intention as shown in table 13 indicates that job stress has negative relationship with turnover intention but not significant. H3 is not supported. It means that leadership style has no positive impact on turnover intention. So, no further testing and discussion about H3a and H3b are needed.

Table 13 Regression of Leadership Style on Turnover Intention

Analysis is done on personality characteristic, leadership style and job stress and finds the interaction effect of personality characteristics *leadership style is not significant. It means personality characteristic has no interfering effect on the relationship of leadership style and job stress as shown in table 14. Therefore, the hypothesis H4 is not supported.

Table 14 Regression Analysis with Interactive Effect on Job Stress

a. R. Squared = .976 (Adjusted R. Squared = .481)

Analysis is done on personality characteristics, job stress and turnover intention and finds the interaction effect of personality characteristics *job stress is not significant. It means that personality characteristic has no moderating effect on relationship between job stress and turnover intention shown as able 15. Therefore, H5 is not supported.

Table 15 Regression Analysis with Interactive Effect on Turnover Intention

a. R. Squared = .880 (Adjusted R. Squared = .481)

According to path diagram shown in figure 2, the result indicates (-0.163) x(0.35)＞-.0139. It means that the indirect effect of job stress on leadership style and turnover intention is larger than direct effect, which means job stress has mediating effect on the relationship of leadership style and turnover intention. So the hypothesis H6 is supported.

Fig. 2 Path diagram

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Conclusion

We choose the insurance industry as the object of study and explore the interrelationship between leadership style and job stress and turnover intention. This research also investigates the variable role of personality characteristic. According to the result of empirical analysis, the conclusions are generated as followings.

(1).For the insurance operators, transformational leadership style has negative influence on job stress, which has something to do with the characteristic of insurance industry because the insurance employees have no base pay and the majority of their income comes from sales bonus. Under such bonus system, if the transformational leadership gives more consideration and encouragement, the employees will be aroused instinct of compression resistance for gaining high income.

(2).Job stress has positive relationship with turnover intention. Job stress usually results in psychological and physical discomfort, and then turnover intention increases.

(3).The style indicates that leadership style has negative relationship with turnover intention.

(4).The verification indicates no interfering effect on the relationship between personality characteristics and leadership style and job stress. Such result differs from those of previous researches and property of such industry may probably be the reason. Different personality characteristic does not moderate the leadership style and high compression resistance of the insurance operators.

(5).Personality characteristic brings no moderating effect on the relationship between job stress and turnover intention. Generally speaking, personality characteristic of insurance salespeople are more enthusiastic and compression resistant than that of other business. The bonus system of insurance industry retains salespeople sticking to the post in order to keep getting commission from the client’s policy premium. Therefore, personality characteristic brings no interfering effect on job stress and turnover intention.

(6)The verification indicates that job stress has bigger indirect effect on leadership style and turnover intention than the direct effect. So, job stress has mediation effect on relationship between leadership style and turnover intention.

Managerial Implications

This research chooses insurance industry as object and expects to explore, through regression analysis, the relationship among the insurance leader’s leadership style and the subordinate’s personality characteristic, job stress and turnover intention. According to the conclusion of this research, following suggestions are provided for management.

(1) Transformational leadership is used to help the subordinates aware that rewards need making efforts. Proper encouragement and consideration are required to raise the eager for future vision and accomplishment of mutual goal.

(2) Insurance job has no base pay and the salespeople are highly autonomous. The leader should spend more time in assistance and communication so that the subordinates understand real stress comes from economic income pressure but not from the job itself.

Limitations

(1) Limitation of Research Scope

Because the research object is the insurance industry only, it’s not easy to generalize the research result to other industry.

(2) Limitation of Research Variables

This research only considers the variables in question. Other variables such as organizational citizen behavior, organizational climate, job involvement and job efficiency are not taken into investigation.

(3) Limitation of Resources

Due to limit of research time, manpower and budget, this research only sent out 220 questionnaires and the sample size is small.

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