Abstract
A company's level of employee success is largely determined by its leadership style. It has the potential to improve or degrade employee efficiency. The purpose of this study is to find out the relationship between participative leadership style, work engagement and job satisfaction. Similarly, the aim of the study is to determine if the fun experienced at work has any effect on participative leadership style, work engagement, and job satisfaction in the food industry company of Sydney, Australia. Several studies have been conducted to demonstrate the positive effect of participative leadership on job satisfaction. However, very few or limited studies have been done with the mediating effect of work engagement and moderating effect of fun experienced at workplace on the participative leadership and job satisfaction. For a healthy working environment in current contemporary organization, a leader plays an important role to motivate employee to perform in an effective and efficient manner (Daft, 2005). Hence, this study provides an important contribution to the field of participative leadership and job satisfaction with the underlying effect of mediating and moderating variables. Meanwhile, all the demographic variables were used as control variables in the analysis. A survey method was used to gather the data from 120 employees from one of the food industry companies in Sydney, Australia. Similarly, five Likert scale ranging from (1) Strongly Disagree to (5) Strongly Agree was used to measure the response of the respondents. To analyze and interpret the data multiple regression analysis, hierarchical multiple regression, and Hayes (2012) Process Macro moderation analysis was used. The result showed that participative leadership has a positive and significant effect on job satisfaction. Similarly, the result further showed that work engagement has a mediating effect on participation leadership and job satisfaction. Lastly, the results showed a low moderating effect on participative leadership, work engagement, and participative leadership.