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Enhancing employee work engagement (EWE) is one of the challenging tasks for the organizational leaders during organizational change. EWE is opposite characteristics of employee burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2008), employee disengagement (Kahn, 1990) and essential for organizational success (Kaliannan & Adjovu, 2015). Therefore, to manage organizational change successfully, researchers and practitioners around the world have considered EWE as an important factor. Prior research studies have proposed different factors such as different leadership styles (Kaliannan & Adjovu, 2015); employee motivating factors (Gilley et al., 2009); employee attitude (Saari & Judge, 2004) and employee phycology (Oreg et al., 2013) for enhancing EWE during organizational change. Hence, linking social bond theory, expectancy theory and mental model theory, current study proposed association between transformational leadership (TL), valence (VAL), EWE and gender diversity. TL (Oreg & Berson, 2011; Eisenbach et al., 1999) and valence (Faupel & Süß, 2019) are important factors for enhancing EWE during the change in organization. Because, TL inspires and motivates followers to engage in the complex condition like organizational change (Coleman, 2018). Similarly, employee valence or positive expectation of the outcome of organizational change also reduces employee cynicism and increases EWE (Faupel & Süß, 2019). However, impact of above-mentioned association may vary in terms of gender diversity. Because attitude and behavior of men and women vary considerably. More specifically, male and women workforce participation, involvement and engagement in the organization activities also vary in different country or cultural context. According to Mathieu and Zajac (1990) it is widely acknowledged that men and women vary in their characteristics, viewpoints, and thought processes, as well as in their socialization, which leads to differences in their attitudes and behaviors at work. Therefore, this study attempted to uncover the above-mentioned associations in Bangladeshi context and scrutinized the gender diversity influence during the complex situation of organizational change in the organizational context of Bangladesh’s banking sector.
Bangladesh is a country form South Asia, is going through major changes in business sector to ensure competitiveness. Considering this, banking sector of Bangladesh also has been transforming and reshaping to meet customers’ expectations (Dhar, 2019; Julia & Kassim, 2019; Islam, Furuoka, & Aida, 2021; Regi and Golden, 2019;). Notable, despite of being a male dominated country (Andaleeb & Vanneman, 2004), participation of women employee in workforce is also increasing in Bangladesh (Verick, 2018). Women participation rate in banking sector is also in increasing trend. However, men and women employees are diverse in attitude and behavior (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990). Hence, managing male and female employees during the transformation of the banking sector of Bangladesh has been the complex issue. Hence, this is noteworthy to investigate the moderating effect of gender diversity in the relationship between TL and EWE; valence and EWE while managing change in the banking sector of Bangladesh. Moreover, to the best of the knowledge impact of gender diversity among such association is still underexplored in Bangladeshi context, specially, in the context of Bangladesh’s banking sector.