The health and performance effects of participative leadership: Exploring the moderating role of the Big Five personality dimensions

Abstract

An extensive body of research acknowledges that participative leadership offers a variety of potential benefits, particularly for workers’ mental health and job performance; however, the work intensification, added challenge, and responsibility required may actually be harmful to some employees, creating more pressure engendering psychological strain. Taking a contingency approach and based on the Conservation of Resources theory, the study suggests that participative leadership may yield different results depending on employees’ personality traits from the Big Five typology. The proposed model aimed to investigate the moderating role of the Big Five traits on the participative leadership–inrole performance relationship and on the participative leadership–psychological strain relationship. In a study of 153 employees and their managers, hierarchical regression analyses showed that the personality dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism served as moderators in the relation between participative leadership and employee inrole performance and psychological strain. Openness to experience was not found to moderate those relations. This study points to the necessity of including personality factors when considering the impact of participative leadership on employee outcomes.