Leadership and Employee Engagement

Abstract

Leadership is one of the most studied topics in the organization sciences, and employee engagement one of the more recent. However, the relationship between leadership and employee engagement has not been widely investigated. As many organizations invest significant resources in retaining, developing, and engaging employees, human resource development (HRD) professionals are tasked to develop and partner with leaders to deliver those strategies effectively. Thus, a comprehensive understanding on the relationship and mechanism between leadership and engagement is essential to HRD professionals informing leaders on how best to cultivate positive results in followers. In this vein, this research conducted an extensive review of empirical and conceptual studies that examined the relationship between leadership and employee engagement, analyzed/ synthesized the studies into integrated frameworks for the leadership-engagement relationship, and proposed future research agendas. Keywords employee/work engagement, transformational leadership, leader-member exchange Many of the most pressing global challenges facing global firms today are directly related to human capital challenges (Tarique & Schuler, 2010

Leader–Member Exchange, Work Engagement, and Psychological Withdrawal Behavior: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment

“…Furthermore, this psychological empowerment leads to various organizational consequences such as high work engagement (Wang and Liu, 2015;Al-Maamari et al, 2017) and low psychological withdrawal behavior (Colquitt et al, 2014;Lorinkova and Perry, 2017). The role of the social exchange relationship between leader and subordinate was found imperative to enhance the work engagement (Carasco-Saul et al, 2015;Galperin et al, 2017). Literature states that few researchers explore the significant positive indirect relationship of LMX and work engagement in the presence of mediating variable employee empowerment (De Villiers and Mendes and Stander, 2011).…”

Promoting the Sustainability of Organizations: Contribution of Transformational Leadership to Job Engagement

“…In terms of psychological states, transformational leadership favors the psychological meaningfulness, safety and availability [14] required for employees to decide to put their hands, mind and heart into their jobs [9]. It represents an important advance in the comprehension of the mechanisms involved in the complex relationship between transformational leadership and job engagement responding to the recent calls made by several scholars [7,23,31,32]; and it serves to enrich the debate on how the distinct forms of leader behavior could have a bearing on employee health and well-being [3].…”

“…The recent meta-analytic review by Hoch et al [30] documented a strong corrected correlation (ρ = 0.48) between transformational leadership and engagement. Despite this, further studies are needed to analyze the mechanisms intervening in the association between transformational leadership and employee job engagement [23,31,32].…”

No Place Like the Frontline: A Qualitative Study on What Participant CEOs Learned From Undercover Boss

“…In past work, researchers acknowledged the important role and influence of senior executives' actions to improve organizational outcomes (e.g., Mueller & Lovell, 2015 ). But numerous gaps in the literature remain on CEO interventions that can positively impact the morale of frontline employees (Blakeley & Higgs, 2014 ;Carasco-Saul, Kim, & Kim, 2015), and very few studies have examined leadership interventions designed to improve bottom-up feedback in organizations (Clarke, 2013 ). In particular, relatively little attention has been paid on how and what CEOs discover when they work side-by-side with lower echelon employees who can communicate their experience of working on the frontlines, as well as offer information and an unvarnished view of the organization as perceived by customers.…”