The role of supervisor leadership in fostering sustainable job satisfaction and entrepreneurial behavior

Seongmin Lim, Sangpil Yoon

Article ID: 8546
Vol 4, Issue 5, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.23812/ssd8546

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Abstract

This study empirically examined how supervisors’ leadership styles influence employee entrepreneurial behavior and analyzed the role of job satisfaction in this relationship. An anonymous online survey was conducted with ordinary employees in South Korea, and 170 valid responses were used for the analysis. Exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, multiple regression analysis, and an additional Sobel test were performed. The results show that transformational leadership positively affects task, reward, and relationship satisfaction, while transactional leadership significantly affects only reward satisfaction. Servant leadership has a significant positive effect on all four dimensions of job satisfaction. In addition, transformational and transactional leadership positively influence innovative risk-taking and proactiveness, whereas servant leadership shows no significant direct effect. Among the job satisfaction dimensions, task satisfaction positively affects both dimensions of employee entrepreneurial behavior, promotion satisfaction shows a negative effect, and relationship satisfaction positively affects innovative risk-taking. These findings provide practical implications for leadership development and organizational strategies to foster entrepreneurship. This study contributes to the literature by extending leadership and entrepreneurship research to ordinary employees in the South Korean organizational context. It also advances prior research by integrating transformational, transactional, and servant leadership with multidimensional job satisfaction and by examining how these factors are differently associated with innovative risk-taking and proactiveness.


Keywords

sustainable leadership; job satisfaction; entrepreneurial behavior; transformational leadership; transactional leadership; servant leadership


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Supporting Agencies

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2024S1A5C2A02046448).



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