How to Protect Employee Health and Well-Being Through 5 Key Leadership Behaviours: Lessons from Scientific Research
Burnout, chronic stress, depression, and other psychosomatic problems have all become well-known terms.
And, unfortunately, they’re only increasing in our workplaces.
As organizations and leaders look to take a proactive approach to mitigating these psychosomatic problems in their employees, one important theme emerges—the role of leadership and impact of specific leadership behaviours.
My masters thesis, “Prevention of psychological illness in the workplace through the sensibilisation of how leadership behaviours affect employee health and well-being” (University of Applied Sciences, School of Applied Psychology, Northwestern Switzerland) explores critical leadership behaviours and their impact on employee health and well-being.
This article summarizes the key findings to offer a starting point for organizations seeking to improve the workplace and work experience for all employees.
Key Findings: Leadership Behaviours and Employee Well-Being
To complement the wealth of research on the relationship between leadership styles and employee health, my master’s thesis sought to explore which leadership behaviours influence the psychological health of employees in the workplace.
To note, in my research—and in this summary—employee health is defined by two aspects: positive well-being and the absence of chronic stress, burnout symptoms, depression, or psychological strain.
Here are the five leadership behaviours that make a significant impact on employee health and well-being:
1. Positive Feedback and Recognition
Recognition in the workplace—in addition to monetary compensation—is one of the most important elements of work. In fact, one longitudinal study over a 25-year period (Wehner and Güntert, 2010) found that inadequate social recognition from supervisors was one of the top five criticisms from employees.
Positive feedback and recognition are associated with less burnout, better wellbeing, and reduced stress. To have this impact, though, the feedback and recognition needs to be authentic. Employee performance feedback, when perceived to be authentic, is related to employee well-being (Sparr and Sonnentag, 2008).
From there, positive feedback and recognition can evoke positive emotions. When an employee achieves a goal or completes a task and is recognized for it, they experience emotions like joy and pride. These positive emotions are part of the motivation process, leading to higher self-esteem and self-efficacy which both increase the employees well-being and motivation to continue performing at a high level.
2. Empathy and Social Support
In the research literature, empathy, and social support fall under the category of “individualised consideration,” one of the four types of transformational leadership behaviours (Bass, 1985, 1990).
Individualised consideration is when a leader acts as a coach or mentor and provides personal attention to the development of the employee. Leaders show concern for their employees by listening, showing empathy and compassion, and offering social support.
Social support falls into four categories (Ducki, 2009a):
Instrumental support: Protecting employees against criticism or unrealistic objectives from other teams.
Informational support: Passing on helpful information to employees.
Emotional support: Listening and being empathetic towards employees.
Improvement-related: Investing time into developing an employee’s decision-making abilities and work behaviours.
Employees who experience these types of social support have less psychological and physical symptoms than those who don’t receive social support. Social support impacts reduce psychosomatic factors like burnout and stress while increasing job satisfaction and affective well-being.
3. Participation
Participation has emerged as a key psychological concept and lever in the fields of Industrial and Organisational psychology for some time, particularly in the fields of Information Technology (Ulich, 2004) and organisational change management (Doppler & Lauterburg, 2008).
Successful change management requires the empowerment of all involved parties to promote a self-steering culture. To empower employees, they need to be involved—they need to participate—in the decision-making process.
Encouraging employees to take an active part in problem-solving and decision-making has a positive impact on the culture of an organisation. Even further, it has a positive correlation with job satisfaction and performance.
Through increased self-esteem and intrinsic need fulfilment (fulfilling the need to be trusted or have an opinion that counts), participation leads to positive motivational self-processes which have strong health outcomes.
4. Job Control and Autonomy
In an organisational context, control is the extent to which individuals are able to influence their work environment and autonomy. An employee’s ability to influence aspects of their job is determined by objective features of the job, such as rules and policies, and the subjective perceptions of how much control they have.
This perception of control has the most important impact on health and well-being (Spector, 2009) because it taps into intrinsic need fulfilment. Of the sixteen basic desires and psychological needs humans have, power and independence are both fulfilled through increased job autonomy. Further, the self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2000), autonomy is a basic need associated with individuals’ well-being.
5. Transparency
The last critical leadership behaviour that impacts employee health and wellbeing is transparency. This includes transparency on:
Job roles
Organisational goals
Management outcomes
Communication
Procedures in respect to fairness
Transparency in these areas is shown to provide a buffer to stress in the workplace and can increase levels of self-esteem. Transparency leads to perceived role, organisational goals, and fairness—the more transparent a leader is, the more secure an employee is in their role and position.
One study (Ursin and Eriksen, 2004) found that the higher the clarity of organisational goals in a department, the lower accumulated stress levels were.
Why it Matters: Lessons for Leaders
The goal of my research was to both identify leadership behaviours that are instrumental in affecting the psychological health of employees in the workplace. These five factors are: positive feedback and recognition, empathy and social support, participation, job control and autonomy, and transparency.
The second goal was to explore the psychological processes which explain why these behaviours are so impactful. These pathways include motivational self-processes like intrinsic need fulfilment and increased self-efficacy.
This short summary of my master’s research on this topic offers two key takeaways for leaders, managers, researchers, and others interested in employee well-being and health:
Specific leadership behaviours have a positive impact on employee health and well-being, so leaders can start to intentionally implement those things into the workplace.
The mechanisms for why these behaviours are impactful are deeply-rooted psychological pathways, indicating the long-lasting and significant impact on individuals.
There’s more to be said here, but my hope is that this summary of research offers insights for more questions, more learning, and ultimately more positive leadership behaviours that transform our workplaces.
Please feel free to reach out to me directly to discuss my research further or its implications on leadership development and the workplace as a whole.