Back to Basics: The Relative Importance of Transformational and Fair Leadership for Employee Work Engagement and Exhaustion

Kaisa Perko,Asko Tolvanen,Ulla Kinnunen,Taru Feldt

doi:10.16993/sjwop.8

Abstract

This study contributes to the literature on the supervisors’ role in employee well-being by drawing on two separate lines of research: transformational leadership and organizational justice. The purpose of the study was to investigate the unique contributions of transformational and fair leadership (justice behaviours of supervisors) on work engagement and exhaustion among employees within the framework of the Job Demands-Resources model (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007). In determining the unique contributions, we additionally acknowledged the role of work characteristics. A questionnaire study was conducted among Finnish municipal employees in a variety of occupations (N = 333, 87% women). The analyses comprised fixed-order regression models with latent variables using Cholesky decomposition (de Jong, 1999) to examine unique contributions of highly correlating latent factors. The results showed no additive effects of transformational leadership above fair leadership in relation to work engagement, that is, fair leadership explained work engagement equally well. However, unfair leadership explained incremental variance in exhaustion beyond low levels of transformational leadership. Thus, our results suggest that transformational and fair leadership are interchangeable with respect to positive well-being, while concerning health impairment, unfair leadership is more detrimental than a lack of transformational leadership. Both forms of leadership demonstrated relationships with employee well-being that were partly independent from work characteristics (role clarity, autonomy and workload), thereby corroborating the specific role of leadership. Implications of the high empirical overlap between transformational and fair leadership are discussed from the point of view of leadership measurement and interpersonal affect within it.

Highlights

Considering the growing body of literature demonstrating the enhancing effects of transformational leadership on employee well-being (Arnold and Connelly, 2013; Skakon et al, 2010), very little is known about what is the added value of transformational leadership compared to other focal aspects of leadership, such as justice behaviours of supervisors
Two pairs of error covariances were released to attain acceptable model fit, these being between two work engagement items (“My job inspires me” and “I am enthusiastic about my job”) and two workload items (“How often does your job require you to work very hard?” and “How often do you have to do more work than you can do well?”)
A discrepancy between the measurement model and the data was observed for which the modification indices indicated remedy by allowing the fair leadership item, “My immediate superior judges my performance justly and fairly” to load on the transformational leadership factor

Summary

Introduction

Considering the growing body of literature demonstrating the enhancing effects of transformational leadership on employee well-being (Arnold and Connelly, 2013; Skakon et al, 2010), very little is known about what is the added value of transformational leadership compared to other focal aspects of leadership, such as justice behaviours of supervisors. In this study, guided by the Job DemandsResources (JD-R) model (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007; Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004), we aim to explicate the unique relevance of perceived transformational and fair leadership in relation to employee work engagement and exhaustion. We investigate the unique roles of fair and transformational leadership in relation to employee well-being while acknowledging the effects of other job demands and job resources. Transformational leadership has reached an established position as the desirable leadership style with regard to employee wellbeing in occupational psychology research (for reviews, see Arnold and Connelly, 2013; Skakon et al, 2010). Prior studies have not empirically investigated, possibly due to the multicollinearity problems, whether transformational and other aspects of leadership are complementary or redundant with respect to employee well-being outcomes

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