Leadership power bases' influences on quality of work life and intention to stay among employees at a selected retail outlet

Abstract

Retailing refers to the activities involved in selling goods or services to the final consumer for personal use as opposed to business purposes. It is a socio-economic system that gets people together to interchange goods and services for a small payment, which matches the final consumers’ needs. In South Africa, the industry has grown by a yearly average of 3 percent in the past eight years and Gauteng, as a province, contributed 26.5 percent to this growth. Therefore, the retail industry has been growing at a very slow rate. Letooane (2013:2) asserts that that there is a need for research in leadership power bases, QWL and how best the needs of employees can be satisfied to improve their intention to stay. In this reard, the primary objective of the study was to examine the relationship between leadership power bases, quality of work life (QWL) and intention to stay among employees at a selected retail outlet in Gauteng province. The research methodology applied to conduct the study was a consolidation of a literature review and an empirical study.The study focused on the work of French and Raven (1959) power sources, namely coercive, legitimate, reward, referent and expert power. It also looked at QWL as the nature of the workforce in retail today is generally very different from the workforce of the past decades. In addition, the study explored how QWL will assist retailers in enhancing their employees’ intention to stay. A quantitative research approach was followed in this study and a simple random probability sampling method was adopted. A structured questionnaire, divided into four sections, was utilised to survey 300 (both male and female) employees from three branches of the selected retail company in the Daveyton township. The pilot study preceded the main survey and the internal consistency reliability was ascertained. Of the 300 questionnaires distributed to the participants, a total of 285 responses were usable for data analysis (response rate of 95 percent). The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 25.0, was used to analyse data into descriptive statistics, reliability and validity analysis, correlations and finally, regression analysis, which was used to test the relationship among the constructs under investigation. The results indicated that coercive power base (β=0.456) and legitimate power base (β=0.210) contribute positively to the prediction of QWL, while reward power indicated a negative prediction of QWL (β= -0.044). Furthermore, the influence of QWL towards employees’ intention to stay was represented by a positive beta weight of (β=0.754). Additionally, all Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.764 to 0.913, (exceeding the threshold of 0.7) thus suggesting that all the items in the scale tap into the same underlying constructs. Results from this research study will assist retailers to increase the QWL levels in their companies by advancing the factors that were identified in this research study. Additionally, these results may enable retail store managers to comprehensively understand how employees perceive power bases and how these employees’ perceptions influence QWL and, subsequently, their intention to stay. The implications of the results are addressed as well as the limitations of the study and future research opportunities are further identified.