From Work-Life Balance to Relationship-Oriented Leadership - A Moderated Mediation via Organizational Justice Conditional on CEO Gender-Equality Orientation -

This study investigates how work-life balance (WLB) among women middle managers relates to relationship-oriented leadership, focusing on the mediating role of organizational justice and the moderating role of the chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) gender-equality orientation. The analysis tests whether justice functions as a key precondition for translating personal resources from WLB into relational leadership behaviors, and whether signals from the top—reflecting the CEO’s commitment to gender equality—shape this translation. Survey data from 3,076 women middle managers employed in Korean firms with 100 or more employees were analyzed, using the third-year wave of the Women Manager Panel. WLB, organizational justice, relationship-oriented leadership, and perceived CEO gender-equality orientation were measured with multi-item scales. A moderated mediation model was estimated with the PROCESS Macro (Model 14). To obtain interval estimates, bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples was applied, and the Johnson-Neyman technique was used to identify regions of significance for the moderator. Results showed three main findings. First, WLB had a significant positive direct effect on relationship-oriented leadership. Women managers reporting better balance also reported greater engagement in listening, empathy, support, and trust-building behaviors. Second, the simple mediating effect of organizational justice was not statistically significant, indicating that justice alone did not automatically carry the effect of WLB into relationship-oriented leadership across the full sample. Third, the CEO’s gender-equality orientation significantly moderated the “organizational justice → relationship-oriented leadership” path. When perceived CEO orientation toward gender equality was low, the justice-leadership link weakened and could even turn negative; when perceived CEO orientation was high, the link strengthened, and the indirect effect of WLB on leadership through justice became reliably positive. Consistent with these patterns, the index of moderated mediation was significant, indicating that the size of the indirect effect varied as a function of the CEO’s gender-equality orientation. Taken together, the findings suggest that the psychological and cognitive resources supported by WLB do not, by themselves, guarantee more relationship-oriented leadership. Rather, the conversion of justice perceptions into relational behavior depends on clear signals from the top. A visible “tone at the top” endorsing gender equality appears to authorize and reinforce the enactment of supportive, relational leadership among women middle managers. The study provides several implications. For theory, the model integrates individual resources (WLB), organizational cognitions (justice), and senior-leadership signals into a single conditional process, clarifying when and how WLB translates into leadership behavior. For practice, two levers appear most effective in combination: (a) job and policy designs that protect WLB (e.g., predictable workloads, autonomy in scheduling, and recovery time) and (b) consistent CEO-level signaling and systems that promote gender equality, which help justice perceptions “travel” into daily leadership actions. Limitations and directions for future research include multi-wave designs, behavioral measures, and broader tests across industries and leadership levels.