PurposeThe aim of the present study is to give insights into the interplay between leadership, well‐being and occupational success by examining the indirect effect of transformational leadership on subjective occupational success mediated by work engagement.Design/methodology/approachA gender‐sensitive approach was applied in order to reveal possible differences in the relations and to deduce gender‐specific recommendations. Data were retrieved from 530 women and 602 men. The participants were questioned on their leader's behavior, their work engagement, and occupational success.FindingsResults show significant positive relations between transformational leadership, work engagement, and subjective occupational success for men and women. Work engagement is found to partially mediate the relation between transformational leadership and subjective occupational success. A significantly higher mediation effect was found for women, although the mediation is present in both gender groups.Practical implicationsBoth for men and women transformational leadership training, as well as interventions promoting work engagement, are promising approaches for the enhancement of occupational success.Originality/valueThe findings advance the understanding of how leaders enhance employees' occupational success and provide gender‐specific insights into the mediating mechanism of work engagement regarding this relation.

In this article, we draw upon the notion that employees’ work characteristics are an important pathway through which leaders influence employee well-being and propose a theoretical framework that integrates perspectives on leadership, occupational stress, and job design. Based on this integrative approach, we developed the health- and development-promoting leadership behavior questionnaire (HDLBQ) for assessing job demands emanating from and job resources provided through the leader. Validation of the measure in German, French, and English using an overall sample of 2,934 employees demonstrated adequate psychometric properties. An examination of the factorial structure revealed three higher-order factors: demanding, development-oriented, and support-oriented leadership. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis indicated structural equivalence across the three language versions of the HDLBQ. Correlations with employee well-being were moderate, and the HDLBQ explained unique variance in employee well-being beyond that explained by transformational leadership. Suggestions for applications of the HDLBQ and approaches to enhance employee well-being at the workplace are discussed.

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PurposeThis study of leaders and followers working in day-care centers aims to use a multilevel perspective on supportive leadership to examine its role in linking workload at the leader level and emotional exhaustion at the follower level. Integrating theoretical work on social support with conservation of resources (COR) theory, leaders' workload is proposed to be positively related to followers' feelings of emotional exhaustion through constraining the enactment of supportive leadership.Design/methodology/approachMultisource survey data from 442 followers and their leaders from 68 teams were collected to test the hypotheses.FindingsMultilevel analyses showed that leader workload was negatively related to followers' perception of supportive leadership, which, in turn, was positively related to followers' levels of emotional exhaustion. Leader workload was indirectly and positively related to follower emotional exhaustion via supportive leadership.Research limitations/implicationsThis study provides initial support for the idea that work contextual factors at the leader level create boundaries for the extent to which leaders may provide support to their followers and draws attention to the accountability of leaders' work contextual factors for followers' well-being.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that organizations must not focus narrowly on training leaders on how to benefit followers but should also aim to optimize leaders' levels of workload to enable them to act in a supportive manner.Originality/valueBy considering both the receivers (i.e. followers) and providers (i.e. leaders) of support simultaneously, we take a crossover approach to COR theory and acknowledge that work contextual factors at higher organizational levels may spread to employee well-being at lower levels of the organization.

Health-relevant leadership behaviour: A comparison of leadership constructs ** There is empirical evidence that leadership behaviour is related to employee wellbeing. Most studies have analysed the relation between individual leadership constructs and indicators of employee well-being. There has been no systematic comparison of different leadership constructs with respect to their impact on different indicators of employee well-being within the same sample. The aim of our study was therefore to compare different leadership constructs with respect to their relation with indicators of positive and negative employee well-being. The sample consists of 1,045 health care workers. We conducted relative weight analyses and hierarchical regression analyses in order to identify the best leadership predictor for employee well-being. Our analyses reveal that leader-member exchange best predicts most of the well-being indicators and that the other leadership constructs fail to add substantial additional variance. Our findings advance the understanding of how leaders can enhance employee well-being and provide implications for research and practice.