Background: Paternalistic leadership style has progressively intrigued organisational behaviour study in the last two decades. An abundance of research is integrating the existing literature on leadership and positive organizational culture to better understand the processes through which leadership leads to life satisfaction.
Objective: One such mechanism through which specific leaders influence life satisfaction is work-family conflict (WFC) and family-work conflict (FWC). Paternalistic leadership is a significant antecedent to develop subordinates' life satisfaction because it integrates discipline with fatherly support. However, no research exists to date on the effect of paternalistic leaders on subordinate' WFC and FWC, which in turn affects their life satisfaction.
Method: The current study examines the impact of paternalistic leadership on employee life satisfaction using a sample of 198 nurses from public sector hospitals of Sindh province in Pakistan. The data was collected through survey questionnaires, and Smart-PLS-SEM was used to test the proposed hypotheses.
Results: The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between paternalistic leadership and life satisfaction. At the same time, there were significant mediation effects on life satisfaction.
Conclusion: The findings indicate that paternalistic leadership positively impacted life happiness through decreasing followers' WFC. However, it has a detrimental influence on FWC, which mediates the effect on subordinates' life satisfaction.
Keywords: Pakistan; Paternalistic leadership; family-work conflict; healthcare sector; life satisfaction; work-family conflict.