Abstract

The construct of employees’ job satisfaction has been gaining an increasing scholarly attention as one of the crucial determinants of organizational effectiveness and success. Specifically, it has been very much acknowledged by both researchers and academics that employees are the most valuable assets of an organization and play the crucial role in achieving its overall objectives. These arguments justify the attention given to studying the psychological characteristics of employees and what determine their job satisfaction that impacts the organizational performance. In addition to that, transformational leadership has been proven to have a significant effect on the employees’ job satisfaction through enhancing the employees’ perception of empowerment. Despite this fact, the dynamic role of transformational style on enhancing the level of satisfaction among the empowered individuals has been greatly neglected. It has been, also, proven in the literature that employees’ satisfaction directly affects the customers’ satisfaction and subsequently the overall organizational performance. In Yemen, as it the case on many developing countries, employees of an organization should be satisfied as the first step to achieve a better organizational performance associated with customers’ satisfaction. The poor performance of Yemeni banks, as customer-oriented business, can be, somehow, attributed to the low level of employees’ job satisfaction. This paper, however, aims to examine the joint effect of employees’ psychological empowerment and transformational leadership on the employees’ job satisfaction. To achieve this purpose, responses of a sample of 160 employees from the Yemeni Islamic banks have been examined. The findings of this study confirmed the direct effect of employees’ psychological empowerment and transformational leadership on the employees’ job satisfaction. On the other hand, the moderating effect of transformational leadership on the relationship between employees’ psychological empowerment and the employees’ job satisfaction was not supported. These findings were, finally, discussed in the lights of the limitations of the study and future research directions were offered.

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