Engaging Leadership

Abstract

Leaders play a profound role in the daily life of their followers. Not only do followers rely on their leader for guidance, leaders also influence how followers feel about their work and how well they perform their work (Skakon, Nielsen, Borg, & Guzman, 2010). Leaders may, for instance, have an impact on how satisfied followers are with their work, how exhausted they are and how stressed they feel. But what exactly is leadership? Although many definitions of leadership exist, they have certain commonalities. Accordingly, leadership is a process (i.e., interaction between leader and follower) in which an individual (i.e., the leader) influences a group of individuals (i.e., followers) to achieve a common goal (Northouse, 2012). For long, researchers have been looking for the most effective person to lead, focusing on personality traits that characterize effective leaders. However, no specific set of traits has been found to characterize all effective leaders. From the mid-nineties, researchers started to focus on effective leadership behaviors rather than personality traits to describe effective leaders. This resulted in a broad distinction between task-oriented leader behaviors, such as setting clear performance expectations and defining performance standards; and people-oriented leader behaviors, such as being friendly and being considerate of followers’ well-being. These behaviors are still reflected in many contemporary leadership styles such as transformational (people-oriented) and transactional (task-oriented) leadership and leader-member exchange theory, in which leader behaviors range from task-oriented to people-oriented, depending on the quality of the relationship between leader and follower. In search of the most effective way to lead, transformational leadership behaviors have been the most popular and most often studied leadership behaviors. These behaviors include inspiring followers with an optimistic view of the future, challenging followers to view their work from different perspectives, and being supportive. Transformational leadership behaviors are known to be effective, as reflected by higher follower job performance and job satisfaction (for meta-analyses see Dumdum, Lowe, & Avolio, 2002; Wang, Courtright, & Colbert, 2011). An important question that I try to answer in this dissertation is how these behaviors are related to followers’ motivation and performance. Understanding the underlying processes that explain how transformational leadership behaviors are related to follower outcomes such as motivation and job performance, advances transformational leadership theory and provides tools for leadership development. Furthermore, although researchers agree that leaders use a variety of behaviors (i.e., both people- and task-oriented behaviors), leadership behaviors are often treated as rather stable. Yet, it seems likely that leaders are more inspirational when they, for example, are more engaged in their work themselves and less inspirational when they have a high workload due to an approaching deadline. In this dissertation I therefore focus on the dynamic part of leadership by studying how fluctuations in leadership behaviors influence followers and by studying different leadership behaviors simultaneously. Finally, I focus on the role of followers in the leadership process. Followers are often treated as passive recipients of leadership, while it has even been shown that leaders adapt their behaviors depending on characteristics of their followers (Dvir & Shamir, 2003). Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly common for followers to no longer work under direct supervision all the time. For example, employees have more flexibility in when and where they work (Baarne, Houtkamp, & Knotter, 2010) and due to the increased complexity of work, followers expect and are expected to work more autonomously. In an attempt to address these issues, I present a series of studies in this dissertation in which I investigate (1) how and (2) when leader behaviors affect employee work engagement and performance – in general and within a short term period (i.e., day/week). Before discussing the specific research questions central to this dissertation, the leadership behaviors studied in this dissertation are briefly introduced.