Role of agile leadership in managing inter-role conflicts for a satisfying job and life during COVID-19 in a VUCA world

Abstract

This study investigated how agile leadership played its role in managing inter-role conflicts during the chaotic period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic was much more than the survival of the fittest and coming out of it alive. Organizations were under immense pressure to resume their normal operations in not-so-normal situations. This period of turmoil and agony brought a broad array of inter-role conflicts, which posed challenges for leaders to manage them effectively. The satisfaction at job and the satisfaction in life were the two most important endeavors for the employees to fight. This study explores how leadership agility helped employees manage their work–family and family–work conflicts, consequently impacting life satisfaction and job satisfaction simultaneously. Moreover, role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload are important intervening role stress factors that impact inter-role conflict management. So, role stress is a moderating factor in the direct relationship between agile leadership and inter-role conflict. This is a two-phased time lag study with a quantitative design for data collection. The first phase of data collection comprises of analyzing the impact of agile leadership on inter-role conflict management, keeping in view the intervening impact of role stress. The second data collection phase examines how inter-role conflicts impacted life satisfaction and job satisfaction during COVID-19. The data were collected from faculty working in higher education institutions in Pakistan, as the education industry was the second major sector that was affected because of COVID-19 after the health care industry. This research found that agile leadership plays a significant role in determining job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Agile leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to manage work–family (AgileL -> WFC -> JS β = 0.1020, p = 0.0112 and AgileL -> WFC -> LS β = 0.1361, p = 0.0014) and family–work conflicts (AgileL -> FWC -> JS β = 0.1598, p = 0.0017 and AgileL -> FWC -> LS β = 0.1160, p = 0.0093) and reduce role stress. Future researchers might include marital satisfaction, as the inter-role conflicts highly impacted marital satisfaction and resultant imbalances among dual-earning couples. Comparative studies in this regard, explaining how dual-earning couples managed to sustain marital health and the role of leadership in developed and developing countries would be enlightening.

Estrategias educativas y de liderazgo para afrontar el nuevo escenario europeo VUCA

“…Our research agrees with Aftab et al (2022) determining that agile leadership plays an important role in determining job satisfaction and satisfaction with academic life. Resilience is an effective way to face adversity situations, so resilient leadership is also useful in multiple fields and social sectors to reverse unfavorable circumstances (Villa-Sánchez, 2020).…”

Untitled

“…Specifically, 70% of the articles were published after 2019. Agile leadership emphasizes adaptation, flexibility, and reactivity, which are needed following pandemics or crises that bring uncertainty and quick change (Aftab et al, 2022;Fernandes, Wong, & Noonan, 2023;Wilson, 2021). With these articles, Turkey, the United States, and Indonesia are the countries that participate in the most research.…”

“…The study's identification, organizational outcome category, number of samples, dependent variable, coefficient values, and their significance with agile leadership as the predictor are presented in Table 3. (Aftab et al, 2022) To assess the role of agile leadership in job and life satisfaction.…”

“…In today's fast-paced business world, companies need to be flexible and able to adapt to changing market conditions to stay competitive. In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak has brought forth uncommon situations in a global environment that is already dynamic, which need leaders to adopt fresh approaches to their leadership methods as the traditional styles are already insufficient (Aftab, Waheed, Khalid, Aftab, & Adnan, 2022;Edmondson, 2021;Lenart-Gansiniec, Sypniewska, & Chen, 2023). However, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that traditional HRMPs are already insufficient, which entails the need to rethink and reformulate them in the direction of more effective innovation while also allowing organizations to survive COVID-19-like crises.…”

Prioritizing the antecedents of employer branding using fuzzy AHP: an extent analysis approach

“…The Indian IT sector is experiencing a huge talent crunch and there will always be a high demand for skilled IT professionals (Dabirian et al , 2019; Bhattacharjee et al , 2011). As the world has emerged out of the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian IT sector has been dealing with an all-time high attrition rate averaging around 25% (Aftab et al , 2022). This sharp rise in attrition has been fuelled by the rise in demand for automation and digitalization across all sectors and the world at large.…”