Empowering leadership and constructive protest: Analyzing the mediating role of spiritual capital(Case study: Imam Khomeini Naval University of Noshahr)

Staff voices and their constructive protests are one of the most important factors affecting organizational change and act as the antidote to laziness. Although many factors, such as authoritarian leadership style and bureaucratic culture, promote organizational silence in most Iranian organizations, empowering leadership and spiritual capital in some Institutions, such as university, encourage constructive protests. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of empowering leadership on constructive voice of employee by considering the mediator variable of spiritual capital in the employee of Imam Khomeini Naval University of Noshahr. The present descriptive-exploratory research is applied in terms of purpose and is based on the deductive research and positivism paradigm in term of philosophy. The statistical population of the study was 588 employees of Imam Khomeini Naval University of Noshahr. Based on Morgan's table, a sample of 233 people was selected by stratified random sampling. In order to measure the variables of the research, the (Arnold et al’s, 2000) empowering leadership Questionnaire, (Liang et al’s, 2012), constructive voice Questionnaire and the (Mas-Machuca and Marimon’s, 2019) spiritual capital Questionnaire were used and Their reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's alpha. For data analysis, structural equations modeling and PLS software have been used. The results of the data analysis show the positive and significant effect of empowering leadership both directly and through spiritual capital on constructive voice of employees.