Authentic leadership, fun at work, work engagement and perceived work performance in a chemical organisation
Abstract
The current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world of work requires renewed approaches to leadership and attaining employee outcomes. The chemical organisation where this research was conducted had a strong emphasis on improving employees’ work engagement and work performance in a cost-sensitive context. Authentic leadership and fun at work were proposed to appropriately address the challenges posed to organisations and their employees in the current VUCA business environment. This study aimed to investigate authentic leadership and fun at work’s relationships with work engagement and perceived individual work performance. This research followed a quantitative cross-sectional research design. A total of 326 completed questionnaires were received; of those 303 were appropriately completed and used in data analysis. The results revealed that authentic leadership had a significant impact on all subdimensions of the fun at work construct and the subdimensions of work engagement. Authentic leadership was found to indirectly affect perceived individual work performance, that is counterproductive work behaviour and adaptive work performance, via fun at work and work engagement.