The Impact of Work-life Integration Flexibility and Authentic Leadership on Work Engagement: The Mediating Role of Basic Psychological Needs among Malaysian Academicians

This study focuses on basic psychological needs as potential mediator in the relationship between authentic leadership inventory, work-life integration flexibility and work engagement through the supportive of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) among academicians in the Malaysian higher education sector. According to SDT, people experience higher levels of intrinsic motivation and engagement when their underlying psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are satisfied. Although work-life flexibility is assumed to foster autonomy, authentic leadership attends to all three of these psychological needs via the qualities associated with authentic leaders, which are high levels of self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing. Employing a quantitative methodology, the study surveyed a sample of 120 academicians in universities, university colleges and colleges in Malaysia. SmartPLS was conducted to analyze the effects of the variables on one another. The results show that relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and balanced processing are significant predictors of work engagement. Furthermore, indirect effects analysis shows that basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) fully mediate the effect of work-life integration flexibility on work engagement and partially mediate the effect of authentic leadership inventory on work engagement. But the roles of self-awareness and flexibility in work-life integration did not prove significant. The findings highlight that work-life flexibility plays in isolation of this context and the importance of leaders who act in an ethical, inclusive and transparent manner to fuel engagement amongst academic staff. The findings provide context-specific contributions to the literature by situating the factors involved within the framework of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) within the context of the Malaysian academia. The implications for institutional policies and leadership development programs are discussed along with suggested future research to test psychological mediators and conduct cross- cultural comparisons.