Abstract
Following the call of recent reviews on leadership and well-being, the purpose of this study is to examine how and when two contrasting leadership styles, transformational leadership (TFL) and passive-avoidant leadership (PAL), are related to employees’ anxiety and thereby either promote or inhibit employees’ well-being. Using the prominent job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical framework, we propose that the relationship between leadership behavior and anxiety is mediated by organizational job demands, namely, role ambiguity (RA), and job resources, namely, team climate for learning (TCL), as well as moderated by autonomy as important job characteristic. A sample of 501 knowledge workers, working in teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization, answered an online survey. We tested moderated multiple mediation models using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results demonstrated that the relationships between TFL as well as PAL on the one hand and anxiety on the other hand were fully mediated by RA and TCL. Job autonomy moderated the quality of the leadership–job demand relationship for TFL and PAL. This paper contributes to understanding the complex relationship between leadership and followers’ well-being taking into account a combination of mediating and moderating job demands and resources. This is the first study that examines the effects of TFL and PAL on well-being taking into account the job demand RA and team processes and autonomy as resources.
Highlights
Modern business organizations are increasingly aware of the importance to sustain and promote employees’ well-being in order to gain and maintain competitive advantage (Nielsen et al, 2017)
Teams have many resources that have been associated with higher levels of wellbeing and lower strain (Avanzi et al, 2015), explaining why working in teams has been linked to employee well-being (e.g., Di Fabio, 2017)
To answer the question of how and when leadership influences employee well-being, we propose that the relationship between transformational leadership (TFL) and anxiety is mediated by role ambiguity (RA) and team climate for learning (TCL), and that the quality of the TFL -RA relationship is influenced by job autonomy
Summary
Modern business organizations are increasingly aware of the importance to sustain and promote employees’ well-being in order to gain and maintain competitive advantage (Nielsen et al, 2017). Albeit organizational and psychological benefits of working in a team, psychosocial risk factors may arise which may lead to employee stress (Navarro et al, 2011). It is a basic tenet in psychological science that stress originates from dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty (Peters et al, 2017). Organizations need to prepare their employees successfully to deal with ambiguity and provide the necessary resources for wellbeing. In this regard, collaborative learning is thought to help in dealing with those challenges and acts as an interpersonal resource (Lases et al, 2019)
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