The roles of mindfulness and spiritual intelligence in transformational leadership and its ethical dimensions
Description
Hypothesis 1: Spiritual intelligence has a direct effect on transformational leadership. Hypothesis 2: Mindfulness has a direct effect on transformational leadership behavior. Hypothesis 3: Mindfulness mediates the effect of spiritual intelligence on transformational leadership behavior. Hypothesis 4: some control variables have a confounding effect on the model. The research proposes that the constructs of mindfulness and spiritual intelligence have important effects on transformational leadership and its ethical dimensions. The data was gathered from a sample of 525 managers, using self-reported instruments (MLQ-5X, FFMQ, and SISRI-24). The study used SEM with a multiple instrumental variable regression approach to evaluate endogeneity and consistency of the effects in the model. The results suggested that mindfulness fully mediated the effect of spiritual intelligence on transformational leadership. The control variables included relevant demographic variables and social desirability, and reported minor effects with no alteration on the pattern of the results; therefore they were considered inconsequential. The main indirect effects of spiritual intelligence were on the ethical dimensions of transformational leadership. Mindfulness presented important effects on transformational leadership, and spiritual intelligence on mindfulness. The results suggested that by developing mindfulness and spiritual intelligence skills as part of the leadership training programs, the organizations could increase the knowledge transfer rate to the workplace of those ethical and values-driven leadership models.