The relationship between benevolent leadership and affective commitment from an employee perspective

Benevolent leadership has emerged as a contemporary leadership style that has been studied only scantly. To fill this gap, this work has two goals. The first is the identification and assessment of the relationship between benevolent leadership and employees’ affective commitment in the context of Polish organizations. Secondly, it will be investigated whether all constructs of benevolent leadership contribute to affective commitment. Data were obtained from 415 company employees. The relationships were investigated using structural equation models (SEMs). Analyses of the results showed that benevolent leadership has a positive relationship with affective commitment. The more benevolent leadership qualities a supervisor has, the more commitment employees show. All dimensions of benevolent leadership are positively correlated with affective commitment. However, the greatest was found in the “community dimension.” All analyzed dimensions correlate positively with each other, so there is a high probability that if a leader displays one BL dimension, he will also display another.