PERCEIVED LEADERSHIP INTEGRITY AND TALENT RETENTION IN CORPORATE EMPLOYEES: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF PERCEIVED ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT

Abstract

In the context of the growing Human Capital deficit and high rates of turnover of talented employees, specifically in emerging economies like the South Asian-pacific part of the world, this study tries to investigate the role of the perceived leaders' integrity in influencing talent retention, where organizational support is considered as a mediating variable. Based on Social exchange and leader-member theory and exchange theory, the integrity of the leaders is taken as a moral signal at the micro-level, which measures the level of decision of the employee to stay with a particular organization for a long term. So to say, Organizational support is a buffer to manage (reduce) capital deficit where the turnover rate is high, with the help of perceived leaders` integrity. The data was collected from 101 employees of different corporate organizations and it was analyzed using correlation, group-difference tests, and mediation via Hayes' PROCESS Macros (Model 4). The findings support the hypothesis that perceived leaders' integrity is positively associated with both perceived organizational support and talent retention, while mediation results reveal that POS (Perceived Organizational Support) fully mediates the relationship between leadership integrity and talent retention, which means leaders' integrity affects employee retention intention primarily through employees' perception of organizational care, fairness, transparency, and support. Additionally, perception of leadership integrity may vary across employee tenure within the organization, while organizational size does not exert a significant effect. Integrating leaders' integrity and support from the organization will allow the skilled workers to work with the organization in the long run, and this research extends the contribution in tackling the talent retention issue in the companies and gives direction to CHRO's to consider these factors for sustainable human capital.