Nurturing the soul at work: unveiling the impact of spiritual leadership, interpersonal justice and voice behavior on employee intention to stay

Purpose This study investigates how the spiritual leadership style of a manager affects employees' intention to stay with the organization, taking into account the post-pandemic workplace and the expected economic downturn. Furthermore, this study aims to assess how employee voice behavior mediates the linkages between the spiritual leadership style and intention to stay and how this mediation is influenced by perceived interpersonal justice. Grounded on the self-determination theory of intrinsic motivation and social-exchange theory, this study seeks to advance the theoretical understanding of spiritual leadership and its associated outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The descriptive study included 379 frontline employees in India's tourism and hospitality sector. Responses were collected from selected employees using the snowball sampling method and met strict inclusion criteria. Self-reporting questionnaires were used to collect data from the participants. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using IBM AMOS 21.0, and hypothesis testing and drawing inferences were carried out using path analytic procedures with PROCESS Macro 3.0. Findings Consistent with the hypotheses presented in this paper, this study demonstrated a statistically significant indirect impact of spiritual leadership on employees' intention to stay with the organization, through indirect effects of employee voice behavior. Additionally, the conditional indirect effects of spiritual leadership on employees' intention to stay, mediated by voice behavior, were contingent upon the level of interpersonal justice as a moderator. Specifically, these effects were significant when the levels of interpersonal justice were low but not when they were high. Originality/value This study makes significant strides in developing and testing a pioneering model that examines the association between spiritual leadership and employees’ intention to stay with the organization. This research explores explicitly how this relationship is influenced by perceived interpersonal justice and employee voice behavior. The results of this study emphasize the criticality of cultivating a culture that inspires constructive criticism and elucidates its potential advantages, effectively bridging a gap in the existing scholarly literature.