The relationship between the transformational leadership style and employee intentions to leave in Saudi Arabia’s real estate industry

Employee turnover is a challenging concern for human resource professionals and the management of organisations, regardless of their business nature or type. Recently, companies in Saudi Arabia have showed large employee turnover rates, and mainly in the real estate sector. Given the crucial role that leadership plays in organisational performance, this research aimed to explore the relationship between transformational leadership and employee intentions to leave the real estate industry in Saudi Arabia. This correlational quantitative research employed an online questionnaire. The multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ Form 5X-Short) was used to measure the transformational leadership style and its five components, and the global measure of job embeddedness, developed by Crossley, Bennett, Jex and Burnfield (2007, 2011), was used to measure employee leaving intentions. Data were collected from 141 employees who were full-time workers in real estate companies of various sizes in Saudi Arabia. The data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. The results of the study confirmed that the transformational leadership styles affected employee leaving intentions and, among the five styles, idealised influence attributes were the most significant to contribute to a reduction in employee leaving intentions. This project discusses this issue in the real estate industry as linked to implemented leadership styles. It is likely that real estate businesses and organisations are encouraged to employ transformational leadership styles and idealised influence attributes to retain their employees and prevent them from leaving. This study investigates the relationship between transformational leadership styles and employee leaving intentions, which has not been discussed in the real estate business context in Saudi Arabia