Benevolent leadership, harmonious passion, and employee work behaviors: A multi-level moderated mediation model

The present study examines harmonious passion as a mediator of the relationship between benevolent leadership and employee performance, i.e., job performance and organizational citizenship behavior. We argue that benevolent leaders satisfy psychological needs in ways that promote harmonious passion, which energizes employee performance. To test our hypotheses, we collected multilevel, multisource, and lagged data from 357 employees in 89 groups. The results indicate that trust climate moderates the indirect effect of harmonious passion on employee performance. The positive indirect relationship between benevolent leadership and employee performance via harmonious passion was positive and significant, but only when trust climate was higher (versus lower). We discuss the implications for theory and practice.