Leadership Research Summary:
- The disease COVID-19 has had an impact on the lives of all people in the world. It also had a great impact on the world economies themselves. There are several scientific publications on the impact of the COVID-19 disease on the work performance of employees, while researchers have focused on less traditional factors such as corporate culture, leadership, or work engagement as well. Corporate culture influences the shared values or behavior of employees at the workplace and creates an environment in which employees work.
- Through leadership, managers should be able to motivate their employees and thereby ensure their better work performance. It can be assumed that if employees are more engaged, their work performance will be higher. The main goal of the paper is to examine whether corporate culture has an impact on the work performance of employees through the mediators of leadership and work engagement.
- The data necessary for the goal set in this way were obtained through a questionnaire survey, which was attended by 489 respondents during the year 2022. After the data reliability analysis, by using serial mediation with two mediators, the influence of corporate culture on work performance was verified independently, but also through the mediators of leadership and work engagement. Based on the results, it can be claimed that individual factors have a significant impact on work performance, while the influence of corporate culture mediated by leadership and work engagement was also confirmed. The influence of corporate culture, mediated only by leadership, and the independent influence of corporate culture through work engagement on work performance were also confirmed.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- Corporate culture as the cornerstone of shaping employee behavior can currently be considered as a competitive advantage of the company. However, corporate culture not only shapes the behavior of employees, but also creates working conditions that have an impact on work performance. Managers themselves are also responsible for the behavior and motivation of employees. Not only do they manage employees, but they have to bring individual goals closer to them and motivate them so that the goals are fulfilled. To be able to do this, the manager must also be a good leader, whom the employees are willing to follow. Working conditions, but also leadership, should have an impact on employee engagement itself. If employees are engaged, it can be assumed that their work performance will have an upward trend.
- The main goal of the study was to investigate whether the corporate culture has an influence through the mediators of leadership and work engagement on the work performance of employees, we consider it fulfilled. We examined the reliability of the data, which was confirmed, and subsequently, researchers were able to verify the established hypotheses through serial mediation with two mediators. Based on the data obtained from 489 respondents, all nine hypotheses were proven. The most significant output of our study was the confirmation of the last hypothesis, as follows: Leadership and work engagement mediate the influence of corporate culture on the work performance of employees. In addition, we found that both leadership and work engagement act independently as a mediator in the relationship between corporate culture and work performance.
- The fact that more than 34% of the obtained data came from micro-enterprises can be considered as a limitation of the research. These data can be more distorted, as a family atmosphere and friendly relations prevail in micro-enterprises.
- The practical benefit of this study is that the findings can be used by managers, but also by the companies themselves, as a guide for improving the performance of employees. If companies will work on improving corporate culture and managers on improving their leadership skills, they can increase the work engagement of employees, which will ultimately improve the work performance of employees.