The Impact Of Autocratic Leadership On Vietnamese Gen Z Employees' Commitment And Performance In Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Abstract

The world is continually changing, as human history progresses, the increase in quality of life and development of technology directly changes how newer generations of people think and act compared to the older generation, more specifically, in the case of Gen Z, they have huge differences, as well as advantages compared to their predecessors. Consequently, organizations and companies nowadays have to make changes to their existing human resources policy to match Gen Z’s need and expectation to be able to run smoothly. However, not all individuals choose to change, for instance, many leaders and managers still use autocratic leadership to manage their workforce instead of changing their approaches to more flexible leadership styles. Even though autocratic leadership is often seen as negative, it proves to be quite effective to the older generations such as Millennials, but how it affects Gen Z raises many questions. Past research showed that, under the right conditions, autocratic leadership could actually be beneficial to the morale and performance of the employees as it created a stable, psychologically appealing and hierarchically ordered environment. In order to study whether the effect still holds true when applied to Gen Z employees, the finish line of this research is to study how the impact of autocratic leadership can affect Vietnamese Gen Z employees’ commitment and performance in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The research utilizes the quantitative method of approach, with the questionnaire successfully recovered 267 respondents, which are all Gen Z’s employees from different fields in Ho Chi Minh City. Under the utilization of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), this study can test the hypotheses. As the results, the research found out that there exists a moderator affecting the relationship between autocratic and performance, which subsequently affects performance and commitment, but it’s not power struggles. And the relationship between psychological safety and commitment is not as expected.