According to study, firms must promote “transformational” leaders and filter out “destructive” characters in order to enhance workers’ health, rather than simply touting wellness initiatives.
Workers are underperforming. Employees worldwide report increased rates of burnout, despite many employers’ efforts to add programs and tools such as counseling, more paid time off, and even free access to meditation applications.
The continuous unhappiness may be due to the fact that none of these methods directly address one of the most significant influences on your well-being: your manager. A new study has identified the exact leadership styles that make the most difference. It also indicated that enhancing good management strategies may be just as significant as reducing negative leadership.
This study, published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, summarizes data from a review of 53 studies that looked at how leadership style influences employee mental health. This meta-analysis gives far stronger evidence than any one inquiry on its own by analyzing data from several investigations. Previous research has demonstrated a correlation between leadership style and mental health, but this new study takes a step further by explaining which types make the most difference. The researchers investigated the beneficial impacts of helpful styles as well as the negative consequences of unhelpful ones.
The researchers compared seven different leadership styles. One of the most popular is transactional, in which managers continuously reward and penalize employees depending on performance. Another common management style is laissez-faire, which involves supervisors mainly leaving people to their own devices. Of the seven approaches, the investigation indicated that two had the most substantial influence on employee well-being: transformative and destructive.
Managers that used a transformational leadership style had the most beneficial influence on the mental health of their workforce. Transformational leaders, first articulated in the early 1970s, inspire others by painting a vision, encouraging team members to think creatively, and customizing their approach to the particular needs of each employee. As judged by employee assessments of their personal well-being, this method produced by far the greatest beneficial effects. It even outperformed the leader-member exchange strategy, in which the manager and employee have a close relationship, as well as the relationship- and task-oriented leadership styles, which stress supportiveness and efficiency, respectively.
However, the researchers discovered that destructive leadership styles, in which managers engage in aggressive and confrontational conduct, have the most detrimental influence on employee mental health. While that isn’t shocking to anybody who has worked under a challenging boss, the analysis did have a twist. Many psychological research have revealed that “evil is stronger than good” in the minds of the majority of people. People often expect a genuinely terrible employer to be significantly more harmful than an inspirational leader to be good. As a result, the researchers predicted that the negative consequences of a terrible leader would be far bigger than the beneficial benefits of a good one. They discovered that transformative leadership was just as effective at explaining beneficial mental health outcomes as destructive leadership was at explaining poor results.
This has far-reaching effects. It suggests that improving mediocre leaders (particularly by assisting them in becoming more transformative) can have just as much of a beneficial impact as reducing destructive leadership. To be clear, businesses should strive to remove toxic behaviors in their management. But the findings show that boosting the number of transformative leaders should also be a high priority for firms. This might be just as helpful as investing in programs like stress-reduction and mindfulness tools. Given that employees frequently utilize such methods to deal with poor or abusive bosses, enhancing leadership via training, for example, might be a more potent response.
Helping managers identify particular acts and attitudes they should adopt or avoid can enhance employees’ mental health. Better management will lead to a healthier company culture overall, one that emphasizes what outstanding leadership looks like and what sorts of behaviors are not accepted. And that shift may start a virtuous cycle: a healthy culture draws better employees and executives over time.
This is an opinion and analysis piece, and the author’s or authors’ opinions may not necessarily reflect those of Scientific American.
Erin Balsa is a highly skilled and knowledgeable health journalist with a passion for educating the public on important health and wellness topics. With extensive experience in both traditional and digital media, Erin has established herself as a trusted voice in the field.