The cultural generalizability of engaging leadership: Validation in the Romanian context

Abstract

Engaging leadership is a managerial style that focuses on satisfying four basic psychological needs of followers (autonomy, relatedness, competence, and meaningfulness) and has been shown to be positively related to followers’ engagement, commitment, and performance. Although the Engaging Leadership Scale has demonstrated sound psychometric properties in several national contexts (e.g., the Netherlands, Belgium, Indonesia, and Russia), evidence from culturally distinct and under-researched contexts remains limited. To advance cross-cultural leadership research, the present study examines the cultural generalizability of engaging leadership by testing the psychometric properties of the Engaging Leadership Scale in Romania, a post-communist, high power distance context. In Study 1 (N = 1295 employees), the scale had an appropriate internal consistency and the findings supported the factorial structure and the measurement invariance (configural, metric, and scalar invariance) of the scale across gender and generations. In Study 2 (N = 803 employees), the construct validity of the scale was supported by the positive relationship between perceived engaging leadership and followers’ work engagement. Overall, the findings provide evidence for the cross-cultural applicability of engaging leadership. The implications for cross-cultural leadership theory and international leadership research are discussed.