How Managers Affect Followers’ Health Behavioral Change: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Employee health is of direct importance to managers of organizations, teams, and individuals. How managers affect employee health behaviors, and changes thereof, is still unknown. Only a few studies have sought these mechanisms associated with “healthy leadership”, including studies that charted how managers/leaders affect employees’ private health lives. In this systematic literature review of fourteen studies, we analyze the mechanisms that have been explored and substantiated so far. We identified eleven categories of variables that can explain the effects of leadership on employee health behaviors. The findings were incorporated into a conceptual model, offering insight into how healthy leadership/management may affect follower health behavioral change. At the core of this individual-change model are: 1) a personal leader-employee relationship and 2) role modelling. It is suggested that this model should be tested empirically, and that the links among the thus far explored independent and outcome variables should be theorized further. Ultimately, efforts to advance effective healthy leadership at work might promote health behavioral changes among employees’ families and related social networks. In effect, managers may become crucial in the slow ascent of preventive medicine, thereby bringing ‘managers back in’ to pursue their potentially lofty, multi-purpose objectives.