Health-Relevant Leadership Behaviour: A Comparison of Leadership Constructs

Abstract

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.

The Key Job Demands and Resources of Nursing Staff: An Integrative Review of Reviews

“…Support for our results also comes from a systematic review of nine systematic reviews by Halter et al (2017), who report managerial style-especially transformational leadership-and supervisory support as among the most relevant factors affecting nurse turnover. Findings from Gregersen et al (2011Gregersen et al ( , 2014 concerning the comparison of different leadership approaches, also lend support to the leadership-related resources we identified and provide insights into the possible relationships between them. Gregersen et al (2011) literature review of employees in different industries linked leadership to employee well-being and found that social support was strongly associated with employee health, as were transformational leadership and employeeoriented leadership.…”

“…Gregersen et al (2011) literature review of employees in different industries linked leadership to employee well-being and found that social support was strongly associated with employee health, as were transformational leadership and employeeoriented leadership. Based on a subsequent empirical study with more than 1,000 nursing home employees in Germany (Gregersen et al, 2014) they propose that an important shared element between these different health-promoting leadership approaches may lie in trustful inter-individual relationships between the supervisor and the employee. This supports an individualized approach to interacting with each employee, rather than adhering strictly to a specific leadership style.…”

Why do employees follow their superiors’ instructions? Identification of the reasons to comply with superiors’ will in a group of Polish employees

“…The extant literature suggests that managers' leadership skills and behavior influence their subordinates' well-being or health through their impact on creating working conditions and the possibility to provide their subordinates with health-promoting resources [5,6,9]. However, many organizations seem to neglect the contribution of the managers to employees' stress, and stress-related illnesses [1].…”

“…On the other hand, a manager may become a model of health-promoting behavior giving example of his or her own strategies or just attitude to health protection [8]. The research revealed that superior-subordinate exchange [9] understood as a unique relationship that a manager has with each of subordinates, influences employees' health and well-being to a greatest extent, as compared to other acknowledged leadership behavior. The research results revealed that this relationship determined not only the general health but also job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion or work-related strain.…”

Work and well-being

“…Dimoff et al (2016) found that a short training session for supervisors and managers increased their knowledge of and attitudes towards employee well-being, their self-efficacy, and intent to promote well-being at work. Gregersen et al (2014), in a sample of 1045 German healthcare workers, compared various leadership constructs as predictors of employee positive well-being (e.g., job satisfaction and general health) and negative well-being (e.g., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, psychological strain as measured by an irritation scale). Leadership constructs included transformational, transactional, leader-member exchange, consideration and initiating structure.…”