Managerial leadership and turnover intentions with the mediating role of employee happiness: an empirical study based on private universities

PurposeThe core emphasis of the paper is to inspect the relationships between managerial leadership, employee happiness and turnover intentions among academicians of private universities in Punjab.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed study used a descriptive research methodology and a structured instrument to collect responses from individuals (n = 400) using a purposive sampling method. SPSS and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) are applied to evaluate the data.FindingsThe outcomes disclosed that managerial leadership has a substantial effect on employee happiness (ss = 0.591, p < 0.05) and turnover intentions (ss = 0.566, p < 0.05). Besides this, it has been discovered that employee happiness mediates the association among managerial leadership and turnover intentions. The present research is among the few empirical findings that have examined academicians' perspectives on their turnover intentions in private universities.Originality/valueBy concentrating on effective managerial leadership and employee happiness, the analysis will be advantageous for human resource (HR) managers and authorities of private universities to strengthen academician retention. Therefore, the study adds something novel to the corpus of extant literature.