Impact of Transformational Leadership on Psychological Empowerment and Job Satisfaction Relationship: a Case of Yemeni Banking

The banking sector of Yemen is under threat due to the lack of confidence and trust of the prospective clients that hindered economic development of the country. The study aimed to measure a moderating effect of transformational leadership on employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction relationship so that attitudes of the Yemeni can be bumped towards banking. In this study, 160 employees were surveyed in different branches of four banks in Yemen. The data were analyzed in four stages namely, reliability and validity analysis, descriptive analysis, multivariate analysis, and hypotheses testing analysis. The study revealed a significant positive relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and transformational leadership towards their job satisfaction level. If the policy makers consider the findings and undertake necessary measures, the Yemeni banking is expected to be accelerated which will contribute to the economy of the country.


INTRODUCTION
Global business environment, in the recent time, has become very competitive (Guest, 2007) and organizations are facing enormous challenges irrespective of their technology, size, and policies in the unpredictable marketplace (Ramlall, 2004). It is widely acknowledged that organization's human asset regarded as most valuable and crucial in achieving its goals (Emami et al., 2013). Therefore, both academicians and practitioners became more conscious about employees' job satisfaction so that loyal and capable employees can be retained. Similarly, scholars have been directed their study to discover the antecedents of employee job satisfaction both in terms of financial benefits and other human aspects of job. It is argued that a correlation between job satisfaction and financial aspects existed in the organization (Ahmed & Uddin, 2012;Maister, 2001). These arguments rationalize the attention between employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction relationship to improve organizational performance.
Yemeni banking sector has been reported fragile to back up the country's development (Yemen Country Profile Report, 2011). The Central Bank's Mayor of Yemen claimed that Yemeni prefer to save money at home due to lack of faith or hesitant to do bank transaction. Surprising, only 2.7 percent Yemeni have banking attitudes and annually circulated cheques fall between 500 and 600 thousand (SIRIM Berhad, 2010). SIRIM (Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia) engaged with scientific, industrial research in Yemen to develop a strategic plan for industrial development. Saeed (2011) claimed that 4 percent Yemeni does transactions with banks. The dearth of customer-focused policies of banks is responsible for poor banking culture in Yemen (Saeed, 2011;Al-Swidi & Mohammad, 2011).
Leadership referred to the essential and effective component in recent business trends for solving socioeconomic dilemma (Finkelstein et al., 2010;Northhouse, 2010). Numerous studies during the last couple of decades found charismatic and transactional leadership roles among leaders (Bass & Riggio, 2010;Yukl, 1989;Bass, 1985). But researchers recently emphasized on transformational leadership which has the impact on both organizational performance, and employees' attitude and emotional encouragement (Bass & Riggio, 2010;Northhouse, 2010;Podsakoff et al., 1990). Transformational leadership gained extra attention than other leadership styles to the researchers in industrial psychology. Leaders can acquire trust, admire, and respect of the followers and inspire them to perform extra roles, and transform employees and organization through transformational leadership (Bass, 1985).
Keeping the above discussed justifications in mind, the study aimed to examine moderating role of transformational leadership on employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction relationship. Besides, the study secures the following objectives: (1) to examine the effect of employees' psychological empowerment on employees' job satisfaction; (2) to examine the effect of transformational leadership on employees' job satisfaction; (3) to measure the moderating effect of transformational leadership on employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction relationship.
Employee job satisfaction has a positive and significant effect on employee productivity (Ahmed & Uddin, 2012). Organizations intend to invest in technology and amend strategies to increase job satisfaction and productivity (Bloom & Van Reenen, 2007). Researchers suggested earlier that job satisfaction come from employees feeling about the job than fulfillment of their desires (Locke, 1976). Many researchers examined and defined lot of determinants of job satisfaction like reward system, individual differences, self-esteem, and locus of control (Chen & Silverthorne, 2008;Lankau & Scandura, 2002). Moreover, employees' job satisfaction resulted from positive behavior of supervisor and colleagues, acceptable salary, job characteristics, promotion opportunities, friendly working environment and organizational policies. Furthermore, job security and autonomy, wages, and advancement scope have significant impact on employee job satisfaction (Ahmed et al., 2013;Silla et al., 2005;Guest, 2004). Some study argued that appropriate leadership influences to make employees satisfied so that organization's objectives can be achieved (Gill et al., 2010). Moreover, successful leaders may have different styles, but they adapt the strategies for gaining employees' trust and loyalty to ensure their job satisfaction (Welch & Welch, 2005).
Employees' psychological empowerment is defined by four elements namely meaning, competence, autonomy, and impact. The meaning refers to values of employees regarding organizational goals formed through one's own beliefs and principles. Competence is the ability to perform tasks with skill and confidence. Impact means influences an employee has over management, operations, and strategic matters. Autonomy is the extent of freedom on individual exercises one's own discretion in the work (Choong et al., 2011;Ghani et al., 2009). Employees intrinsic needs fulfillment flourish them with selfdeterminant, responsible and independent to function enthusiastically and grow persistently (Maslow, 1971). Additionally, several studies supported employees' empowerment as a means of organizational commitment (Han et al., 2009;Spreitzer & Mishra, 2002), customer satisfaction (Chebat & Kollias, 2000), performance (Sigler & Pearson, 2000), and motivation (Caudron, 1995). Employees' sense of empowerment is attributed by job structure, participation in decision making, employment relationship, and collaboration of peers in the work environment (Varekamp et al., 2006). But Jha and Nair (2008) acknowledged that empowerment is the product of supervisor and employee relationship that determine the subordinates performance.
Since the 1980s, transformational leadership has been found crucial approach in leadership styles (Northhouse, 2010). In explaining the influence of transformational leaders over their followers, Kirkbride (2006) argued that inspirationally motivated leaders encourage their followers to produce greater performance. The transformational leadership consisted of four dimensions such as Idealized Influence (strategy and vision, cohesion, respect, reliance and synergy), Motivation (setting ambitious goals and targets), Stimulation (creativity and innovation, team behavior), and Individual Consideration (emphasize followers capabilities, potentials, desires and work support for development). The said dimensions have been found in several studies (Afshari et al., 2012;Bass & Riggio, 2010;Luthans, 2005). In organizational settings, transformational leadership as intuitive approach has positive impact on individual-level and organization-level performance (Schein, 2010;Lowe & Gardner, 2001). Additionally, transformational leaders promote supportive collaboration among team members emphasizing followers' needs, values, and morals which is crucial for the innovative team process and organizational performance enhancement (Schein, 2010).
Al-Hussami (2008) conducted a study on 192 nurses, in the south-eastern United States, revealed a positive relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction. Similarly, job satisfaction of sports administrators in South Africa demonstrated by implementing transformational leadership (Naidoo, 2008) also showed a positive relationship. Moreover, a meta-analysis conform a positive impact of transformational leadership on job satisfaction, motivation and leader effectiveness (Judge & Piccolo, 2004). Recently, relationship between charismatic leadership, stimulation, and motivation with job satisfaction were found to be positive whereas individual characteristics and job satisfaction relationship were negative (Omar & Hussin, 2013). Numerous studies in different countries supported the correlation between leadership and job satisfaction (Berson & Linton, 2005;Seo et al., 2004;Stordeur et al., 2000) but didn't specify the leadership style they implemented.
Transformational leadership has influence on in-role performance which was mediated by the leader trustiness and psychological empowerment (Bartram & Casimir, 2007). However, leader trustiness partially mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and job satisfaction. Avey et al., (2008), using SEM technique, revealed that transformational leadership has positive significant relationship with employee empowerment. Avolio et al., (2004) confirmed earlier that employee empowerment is precursor of transformational leadership to achieve organization's goals. Conversely, transformational leadership does not moderate the relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction, though a strong relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction has been established whereas job satisfaction highly influenced by transformational leadership than employees' psychological empowerment (Swidi et al., 2012).
Despite numerous number of studies established relationship between transactional leadership and psychological empowerment (Avey et al., 2008;Avolio et al., 2004), but moderating effect of transformational leadership on empowerment and satisfaction relationship is still ignored. Therefore, the study expected to examine the relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction by using transformational leadership as moderating variable to bridge the gap. The research framework of the study is presented in Figure 1.

METHODS
The respondents of the study consisted of Islamic Banks employees located at Sana'a in Yemen where majority of Islamic Banks branches were established. The data have been collected from 18 different branches of four banks, namely Tadhamoon International Islamic Bank, Saba Islamic Bank, Yemen Bahrain Shamil Bank, and Islamic Bank for Development and Financing. As recommended by Sekaran (2003), the sample size would be 160 having good representation of 260 populations. The study distributed 202 questionnaires where 170 were returned of which 160 questionnaires were used for the study. The data were collected through selfadministrated survey method where questionnaires were designed on employees' job satisfaction (EJS), employees' psychological empowerment (EPE), and transformational leadership (TL).
In this study, Likert 5-point scale was used to get the perception of the respondents regarding the statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree because of its easy construction, appealing design, adaptability and relative reliability (Babbie, 1990;Nunnaly, 1978). The questionnaire consisted of four sections. The first section contained the questions regarding employees' perceptions of psychological empowerment. The second section included the questions related to transformational leadership of the supervisor. Next, employees' job satisfaction related questions were in the third section, and the fourth section was designed for getting employees' demographic information.
After collection, the data were feed and analyzed through SPSS 16.0 version software. Data have been analyzed in four different stages namely; reliability and validity analysis, descriptive analysis, multivariate analysis and analysis for testing hypothesis. To establish the goodness of measure, reliability of items measured through Cronbach alpha. Cronbach alpha is the coefficient of reliability used to estimate the reliability of psychometric test. According to Hair et al., (2010), Cronbach's alpha should be ≥ 0,7 of the items for internal consistency and reliability; however, 0.6 is considered the minimum level of acceptability.
The descriptive statistical tools used to describe the demographic variables quantitatively. Multivariate statistical tools like factor analysis were done to identify the major influential items of the questionnaires and Pearson correlation was employed to examine the relationship between the variables. Multiple linear regression analysis was adopted in this study to examine the significance of the interaction terms.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The demographical variables of the study such as job title, age, gender, education, specialization, and job experience of the respondents are shown in Table  1. To identify the different aspects of job satisfaction, PCA (Principle Component Analysis) was used with varimax rotation. KMO was found 0,786 which is > 0,6 and Bartlett's test indicates factorability of the dimension was significant. KMO and Bartlett's test is the measures of sampling adequacy for overall and each variable. Two factors of job satisfaction with Eigenvalue greater than 1 were found from the nine items. These factors explained variance with 57,25% in employees' job satisfaction construct. Satisfaction on pay and promotion (SPP) and satisfaction on supervision and coworkers (SSC) were found in accordance with loaded items, as seen in Table 2. The factor analysis was conducted with the items regarding employees' psychological empowerment in determining its underlying dimension. The KMO was found 0,798 that exceeded 0,6 were significant. The factorability of the dimensions was significant by Bartlett's test. The items factor loadings on the extracted factors indicated three factors underlying the construct with 68% variance. Among four psychological empowerment dimensions three items were loaded namely meaningfulness and competence, employees' self-determination and impact are shown in Table 3. To identify the factors that measure transformational leadership, the factor analysis technique was used. The KMO was found 0,909 which is highly above from the recommended limit of 0,5 and also the Bartlett's test was significant. Two dimensions of transformational leadership from the four items were identified such as inspirational motivation and individualized consideration which shown in Table 4. Pearson correlation analysis describes the nature and strength of the bivariate relationships amongst pairs of variables in the study. Correlation between two variable ranges between -1,0 and 1,0, perfect negative and perfect positive respectively. Table 5 indicates that each pair of the variable psychological empowerment, transformational leadership, and the employees' job satisfaction has a significant positive correlation at the 0,01 level. The direct influence of psychological empowerment and the transformational leadership on employees' job satisfaction was measured through multiple regressions. The regression model of the study showed that the overall model was valid (F value = 17,714; p < 0,001) accounted for about 30% of the variance in the employees' job satisfaction. The findings revealed that employees' psychological empowerment is the positive significant predictor of job satisfaction (β = 0,461; t = 6,127; p < 0,05) which signify that when employees empowered more the higher level employee satisfaction will be gained. Similarly, transformational leadership have strong prediction power to job satisfaction level with indicators (β = 0,461; t = 6,127; p < 0,001). Thus, transformational leadership has stronger prediction power to the employees' job satisfaction than employees' psychological empowerment. These results, however, support the hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2, as seen in Table 6. The moderating effect of the transformational leadership on employees' psychological empowerment and job satisfaction relationship have been measured by the hierarchical multiple linear regression. Baron and Kenny (1986) suggested performing regression analysis in several blocks. The first block includes gender of respondent as the control variable. The second block contains employees' psychological empowerment and transformational leadership that examine their predictive power towards employees' job satisfaction. Lastly, the third block includes the interactions to examine the moderating effect of the hierarchical regression model reported in Table 7.
In model 2, two predictors which are psychological empowerment and transactional leadership, were introduced in this model was valid (F value = 23,617; p < 0,001) with significant R change and accounted for 29.8% of the variance of employees job satisfaction. In this model, however, the predictors namely employees' psychological empowerment (β = 0,174; t = 2,335; p < 0,05) and the transformational leadership (β = 0,458; t = 6,116; p < 0,001) have significant effect on employee job satisfaction at 0,05 and the 0,001 levels of significance respectively.
In model 3, the model was valid (F value = 17,714; p < 0,001) but the changes in R2 is not significant. Similar to the previous model, employees' psychological empowerment (β = 0,183; t = 2,396; p < 0,05) and transformational leadership (β = 0,461; t = 6,127; p < 0,001) have significant effect on the employees' job satisfaction at 0,05 and 0,001 level of significance respectively. From the study, some insights regarding employees' job satisfaction corresponding to the employees' psychological empowerment and transformational leadership has been revealed. The study uncovers the significant effect of both employees' psychological empowerment and transformational leadership to employees' job satisfaction. Alternatively, moderating role of transformational leadership was not significant on the relationship between employees' psychological empowerment and employees' job satisfaction, as shown in Table 8. There is a significant effect of transformational leadership on the employees' job satisfaction. Supported

H3
There is a significant moderating effect of the transformational leadership on employees' psychological empowerment and employees' job satisfaction relationship.

CONCLUSIONS
Job satisfaction of employees is one of the major determinants of organizational success which bring organization's growth and expansion. In Yemen, due to globalization and open economy strategies, the employees' satisfaction issue received more interest from business owners and managers. Empowerment and transformational leadership style have been the crucial determinant of job satisfaction; therefore, time comes to think about it so that the country's economy can be accelerated to countenance global challenges. Customer satisfaction is the outcome of employee satisfaction that encourages existing and potential customers to deal with the respective organization. The study confirms that employees' job satisfaction comes through the psychological empowerment and transformational leadership. Thus, the study opened new insights on how to enhance employees' job satisfaction level through institutionalizing psychological empowerment and transformational leadership.