Health-Focused Leadership – Prevention and Intervention as Enablers of Work Ability and Performance

Abstract

This study aims at advancing our knowledge of the conceptualization, measurement, and organizational functioning of health-focused leadership. By drawing from the fields of organizational psychology, medicine, public health, disability management, and social work, and transferring this knowledge to the leadership context, we derive a health-focused leadership construct with the two dimensions of prevention and intervention. In a second step, we develop and test a model of organizational health in which prevention and intervention behaviors relate to emotional exhaustion and work ability, which in turn, relate to job performance and turnover intention. We base our scale development and model testing on a qualitative study with 153 employees of a German car manufacturer and two quantitative studies with 96 members of the German working population, respectively 1,277 employees of a German public service organization. We find that prevention and intervention behaviors are significant predictors of employees’ physical and psychological health states and that these, in turn, show significant relationships with both job performance and turnover intention.