The influence of leadership style,organisational justice and upward influence tactics on job satisfaction of knowledge workers / Siti Rohaida Mohamed Zainal

The new millennium is said to be the century of the knowledge workers, knowledge enterprises and knowledge economy. The Eighth Malaysia Plan and the Knowledge-Based Economy Master plan and The Ninth Malaysia Plan call for greater exploitation of knowledge as a key resource to spearhead future growth. This study examines the k-worker's j'ob satisfaction via a conceptual framework consisting off our key constructs namely, leadership style, organisational justice, and upward influence tactics. The conceptual model presented is a parsimonious account of job satisfaction of the k-workers, which will be the defining outcome in retaining and enabling k-worker's continuous value creation. Leadership style, i.e, autocratic ,democratic and nurturant-task, organisational (procedural justice, interactional justice and distributive justice). Literature concludes that job satisfaction is a summation of several criteria. Hence, this variable was analyzed based on five dimensions namely reward satisfaction, growth satisfaction, supervisor satisfaction, co-workers satisfaction and job satisfaction. Upward influence tactics were measured along three dimensions, which are soft tactics, hard tactics and rational tactics. Lastly, supervisor respondent's gender similarity was used as the moderating variable. This study used Multimedia Super Corridor Status Companies (MSC) as sample framework and k-workers as unit of analysis. Results were drawn from 442 respondents. A standard hierarchical multiple regression was applied in order to test all hypotheses posited in this study. Findings show that 58% of the hypothesized relationships between the variables in the framework are supported. In conclusion, it was found that k-worker's satisfaction as strongly influenced by their perspective of justice, the leadership styles. There are also new findings emerged based on the result. Upward influence tactics and gender similarity for example were found able to moderate the relationship leadership styles and organisational justice towards job satisfaction. In sum, from the perspective of k-workers, leadership styles and organisational justice were posited as affecting job satisfaction with upward influence tactics with gender similiarity as title moderation.