The Team Leader as Karta: Emotional Intelligence, Joint Family–Oriented Leadership, and Employee Retention in Indian Organizations

The current study examined the possible role of leader emotional intelligence in employee retention through joint family oriented leadership behaviors in Indian organization. Although the hypothesized mediation model was non-empirically supported, the results provide a more basic insight: culturally embedded leadership archetypes may not be compatible with the presumptions of reflective latent-variance modeling. The attempt to operationalize the metaphor of Karta highlights the complexity of the process of converting socio legal, institutional and identity-based leadership roles into standardized psychometric instruments. Rather than refuting indigenous leadership theory, these results call for an increased level of conceptual precision and methodological innovation in cross cultural research. By foregrounding the issue of measurement validity at the center rather than periphery, the current investigation contributes to developing a more contextually-based and theoretically reflective body of organizational behavior scholarship-one that recognizes the complex interaction between culture and leadership identity and empirical operationalization.

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