Leadership Soft Skills, Perceived Trustworthiness and Structural Empowerment: A Correlation

To generate trust inside organizations, administrators with soft skills must build relationships and alliances with their staff, as well as create work conditions that empower employees to carry out their responsibilities. Administrators must essentially boost perceptions of trustworthiness. To solve this shortcoming, educational administrators must be informed and cautious about the notions of soft skills, dependability, and structural empowerment. This article investigates the relationship between each component of leadership soft skills, structural empowerment, and perceived trustworthiness. The mediating function of structural empowerment in the link between leadership soft skills and the perceived trustworthiness of the Head of Faculty was also investigated. This study collects its quantitative data using a survey questionnaire. The survey included 225 respondents who worked as administrative professionals in clerical and office assistant positions at three major campuses of Malaysian public higher education institutions in Malaysia's northern state. The study found that perceived trustworthiness and structural empowerment were substantially connected to all eight components of leadership soft skills. However, structural empowerment did not act as a bridge between leadership soft skills and perceived trustworthiness.