This paper analyzes the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being in remote work environments. As several studies suggest, there is a positive relationship between transformational leadership and employee well-being, but it is rather complex as it is influenced by specific mediating and moderating factors. Since the ongoing COVID-19 crisis forced many teams into remote working conditions, also leadership was predominantly performed virtually. This leads to adapted requirements for the promotion of employee well-being. This paper seeks to identify those adjustments. Thus, a conceptual model was constructed to illustrate the relationship of transformational leadership and employee well-being, which was then applied to remote work environments to propose relevant adaptations.
Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being in remote work environments. As several studies suggest, there is a positive relationship between transformational leadership and employee well-being, but it is rather complex as it is influenced by specific mediating and moderating factors. Since the ongoing COVID-19 crisis forced many teams into remote working conditions, also leadership was predominantly performed virtually. This leads to adapted requirements for the promotion of employee well-being. This paper seeks to identify those adjustments. Thus, a conceptional model was constructed to illustrate the relationship of transformational leadership and employee well-being which was then applied to remote work environments, to propose relevant adaptations.
Evaluating the Impact of Transformational Leadership on Employee-Wellbeing in Remote Work Environments
The promotion of health in the workplace has been a subject of interest over the past decades among scholars. One possible approach that this complex field offers, is the impact of leadership on healthy workplaces, exploring which kind of leadership behavior and which leadership styles have a positive impact on employee well-being and how. The common definition of leadership is, that an individual leads a group to a shared goal. Furthermore, it is the capacity of consciously influencing other individuals by engaging them to contribute, guiding them to the development of their skills and creating responsible and constructive relationships (Bouvard & Suzanne, 2016, p. 83ff.). The aspect of influence is essential and calls for a deep understanding of these interdependencies. Multiple studies explored the impact of leadership on employee well-being in depth. Besides research pointing out the significance of health-promoting leadership, scholars also identified follower-oriented leadership styles, such as transformational and servant leadership to be beneficial for employee well-being (e.g. Franke et al., 2014; Hildenbrand et al., 2018; van Dierendonck & Nuijten, 2011).
One aspect that has not yet been explored sufficiently in this context is this relation within a remote work environment. The rapidly unfolding COVID-19 crisis is forcing many employees into remote work conditions – a sudden shift which is causing mental health consequences, such as anxiety, loneliness and depression (see Tuzovic & Kabadayi, 2020). As a study among US tech workers discovered already in 2019, 82 percent of the remote workers felt burned out (Staglin, 2020). As more workers around the world are shifting to a remote working mode, this percentage is to become even more drastic.
This calls for a reevaluation of the relevant findings regarding the relationship between transformational leadership and the promotion of employee well-being in regard to remote work environments.
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being in remote working conditions and to construct a conceptional model which illustrates the adaptation of this framework to remote work conditions.
To achieve this aim, the mainresearch questionis as follows:
How can the existing knowledge about the relationship between transformational leadership employee well-being be applied to remote work environments?
This research will be based on an extensive literature review. In the first part, relevant studies analyzing the relationship between transformational leadership and employee well-being will be assessed. These findings will be illustrated in a conceptional model. The second part will analyze the above-mentioned relationship in remote work environments to determine relevant changes. Studies of remote working conditions covering work-stress and employee well-being as well as transformational leadership will be considered. Those will include recent work accomplished during the COVID-19 crisis, as well as prior studies. Based on these findings, the constructed model will be adapted to illustrate the relevant changes when applying it to remote work environments. Finally, a prospect to possible future research in this field will be given.
The scope will include completely virtual teams only with a continuous lifecycle. It focuses on teams set up in the classical team structure, which means one supervisor and two or more followers.
Employee Well-Being
Induced by the happy worker – productive worker thesis of the 1930s, employee well-being has been a subject of interest among scholars for the past decades, mainly because numerous studies were able to link it to individual and organizational performance up to date (e.g. Hindrichs et al., 2016; Baer et al., 2018; Nielsen et al., 2017; Renee Baptiste, 2008).
Danna and Griffin (1999) defined well-being as a construct including life and job-related satisfaction as well as the general health of the individual. Although there are studies linking well-being in the personal life to well-being at work (Ryan & Deci, 2001), this paper will solitarily focus on employee well-being. Employee well-being relates to the context of the workplace and comprises the dimensions job satisfaction, job-related mental strain and job-related depression (Warr, 1987). As this concept raises the question how organizations can ensure or enhance employee well-being, many studies examined its relation to other possible factors, such as organizational culture, HRM practices, character traits or leadership behavior (Chang & Lu, 2007; Clarke, 2012; Burke & Fiksenbaum, 2009). The latter received vast scientific attention, leading to an exploration of different leadership styles, among others. Scholars were able to identify follower-oriented leadership styles as beneficial for employee well-being (e.g. Franke et al., 2014; Hildenbrand et al., 2018; van Dierendonck & Nuijten, 2011). A category which transformational leadership belongs to.
Transformational Leadership
Transformational leadership has first been introduced by Burns, who distinguished between transactional and transformational leaders, and was then defined further by Bass. According to Bass, transformational leaders are those who “help followers grow and develop into leaders by responding to individual followers’ needs by empowering them” (Bass & Riggio, 2006, p. 3). It includes four different types of behavior. The first one isidealized influence, which is also referred to as charisma, meaning the leader is able to inspire the followers’ devotion and loyalty and emphasizes the importance of a collective mission. The second one isinspirational motivation, which refers to the leaders’ ability to appeal to followers’ feelings, convey a positive future prospect and transmit confidence about a successful goal accomplishment. The third one isintellectual stimulationbehavior, which describes a leader who questions assumptions and encourages followers to do the same and re-think ideas. The last component isindividualized consideration, comprising that the leader pays attention to the individual, unique needs of each follower and aims to coach and develop them (Purvanova & Bono, 2009).
Sivanathan et al. proposed that all four components are relevant for employee well-being (2012, p. 241 ff.): Asidealized influencereflects behavior carried out because the leader chose to do what is right, followers who witness this are more likely to develop a high level of trust and respect towards their leaders and have a positive experience of interpersonal justice, which then has a positive impact on well-being.Inspirational motivationis achieved when leaders encourage followers to go beyond their usual performance by promoting their feeling of self-efficacy and shift their focus to their strength, abilities and accomplishments.Intellectual stimulationis also adding to the employees’ self-efficacy. As leaders constantly challenge the followers to think for themselves, they become more confident, which then promotes their well-being. By recognizing the employees’ needs, as it is part of the componentindividualized consideration,the leader offers empathy, compassion and guidance that employees may obtain to enhance their well-being.
In addition to this, various empirical studies supported the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being, for instance, Syed et al. (2018) found out in a quantitative study that transformational leadership is significantly negative related to work stress. But this interconnection appears to be more complex than this, as multiple studies were able to identify mediating and moderating factors of this relationship. For instance, Kelloway et al. (2012) revealed that trust in leadership is a mediator of this relationship, while also outruling followers’ liking of the leader and a respondent personality as influential factors. In a different study by Arnold et al. (2007) the authors found out that the degree to which followers experience their work as meaningful mediates or partially mediates the positive relationship of transformational leadership and employee well-being. Also Sivanathan and colleagues (2012, p. 241f.) argued, that specific psychological processes mediate the relationship, those are the followers’ self-efficacy, trust in management, perceived meaningfulness of their work and their form of work identification. Furthermore, Hildenbrand et al. (2018) pursued research building up on the proposition by Bass, that transformational leadership does not fulfill the needs of all employees equally. Thus, they conducted a study to analyze the relationship between transformational leadership and burnout in which they were able to identify the employees’ thriving as a mediating factor. Additionally, they detected the followers’ openness to experience as a moderator. Derived from these findings, the authors then proposed a more follower specific approach of transformational leadership. Another moderating factor, revealed in a cross-sectional study, a two-wave time-lagged design and an experimental study by Kaluza et al. (2021), is the followers’ expectation of a health-oriented leadership style.
The above cited mediating and moderating factors of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee well-being are illustrated in the following figure.
Figure 1:
illustration not visible in this excerpt
Source: Own creation based on sources cited above.
As the positive impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being received substantial empirical support, mediating and moderating factors of this might be only partly revealed so far and suggest further research in this field.
Remote work environments
As a measure of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, several organizations and governments requested employees to work from home, thus inducing a significant change in the employees’ work life. Considering employee well-being, two important aspects of this measure are the transfer to remote work environments and the change itself that the employees are experiencing. Starting with the latter, in recent studies, change has been linked to a higher level of burnout and stress of employees, but with supervisor support having a moderating role (Guidetti et al., 2018; Smollan, 2015).
Already before the COVID-19 crisis, a more complex, dynamic and global nature of work has created an emphasis on distributed, virtual working units, allowing organizations to compose a team of experts disregarding their physical location. A shift of working mode, that has also triggered several studies in this field, mainly focused on the advantages and disadvantages of remote work environments. Disadvantages pointed out are lower levels of team cohesion, work satisfaction, trust, cooperative behavior, social control and commitment (Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014; Liao, 2017). Besides those, also the increased use of technologies leads to a rising level of stress, leaving team members with a feeling of distance, anonymity and a lack of purpose (Lauring & Jonasson, 2016; Molino et al., 2020).
Considering definitions of virtual teams prior to the COVID-19 crisis, it is obvious that their nature has changed. The central purpose being the crossing of boundaries of space (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002) is controversial to the majority of teams shifting to remote work environments due to social distancing measures (Kniffin et al., 2021). A second aspect is the team’s lifecycle. While the prototypical virtual team prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was described to have a rather discrete lifecycle (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002), the change imposed by the crisis suggests that the proportion of discrete and continuous lifecycles should be similar to those of face-to-face teams. This points to a possibly limited relevance of prior studies for remote work environments as they exist today. How virtual teams will be characterized after the COVID-19 crisis is not yet foreseeable, but researchers propose that it will lead to long-term effects reshaping the business world (Kniffin et al., 2021).
Scholars widely agree that leadership in virtual teams is more challenging, yet it plays a key role for employee well-being (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002; Hoch & Kozlowski, 2014).
Personal interactions with colleagues and supervisors can only take place electronically, which makes the development of trust, managing conflict and team decision making considerably more difficult (Wilson et al., 2021). Functions such as mentoring, coaching or team development processes are much more demanding to perform virtually (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002). If virtual teams are well managed on the other hand, employees may experience the flexibility, which remote work environments provide, thus facilitating their work-life balance and increasing their job satisfaction (Liao, 2017).
Selected studies contributed to explore how leadership has to be designed to promote employee well-being in remote work environments. A critical trait is the leader’s ability to build relationships and trust among team-members as well as creating a consensus on shared goals within the team. This is especially relevant for teams that are continuous in nature. As it does not happen as naturally as in face-to-face environments, it requires the supervisor to invest more time and effort. Close interactions with each team member and trust-building behavior can be beneficial for this (Chumg et al., 2015; Liao, 2017). In line with this, a study of Lauring and Jonasson (2016) showed, that gathering teams around inspiring shared goals leads to positive group effects. The researchers therefore suggest inspirational motivation behavior, which is part of transformational leadership style, to be beneficial for remote work environments. Another study by Purvanova and Bono (2009) which compared transformational leadership in virtual and face-to-face teams revealed that transformational leadership has a stronger effect in virtual teams and that leaders who intensify their transformational leadership behaviors in those teams hereby improve the team performance. On the other hand, the researchers also argue, that transformational leadership behavior is much harder to display in virtual conditions than face-to-face. Liao (2017) supported the latter by proposing that transformational leadership is weakened by remote work environments, as its cues are harder to detect when they are not communicated face-to-face. The researcher also argued, that although relationship-oriented leadership behavior was proven to be beneficial for remote work environments, leaders are actually less relationship oriented. A different study to analyze the effects of transformational leadership in electronic communication was carried out by Kelloway et al. (2003). The researchers first used a vignette methodology to show that employees are able to detect leadership styles in e-mails, which also revealed, that they associate interpersonal trust and satisfaction with transformational leadership. In a laboratory setting, they also tested whether charismatic leadership behavior has an impact on employee motivation. This has been proven in face-to-face environments before, so the aim of the study was to find out if the results are also valid for electronical leader-follower communication. The study showed no effects of charismatic leadership behavior on employee motivation.
Until now, there are only limited studies in this field carried out during the COVID-19 crisis which are fairly relevant for this research, but should not be left unnoticed. Dwiedienawati et al. (2021) focused on the aspect of crisis management and found that transformational leadership, among others, offers an effective leadership approach during crisis with high uncertainty. A different research by Bartsch et al. (2020) analyzing the service industry, pointed out the importance of a task- and relationship oriented leadership style to enhance the employees’ work performance. Studies focusing directly on the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being are not available at this point. Another project by a large, diverse team of researchers proposed, that the implications of COVID-19 have worsened the working conditions of employees, including a greater risk for employees encountering burnout (Kniffin et al., 2021).
As mentioned above, there was a strong drive towards remote work environments already before the COVID-19 crisis and they will very likely play a significant role of the global work life after this as well. This is why this research seeks relevance for remote work environments in general, looking at COVID-19 as yet another factor adding to the complexity of the topic.
Discussion
The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of transformational leadership on employee well-being in remote working conditions. The body of research shows that there is a clear connection between transformational leadership and employee well-being, in face-to-face as well as in remote work conditions. But the causal mechanisms of this relationship with its mediators and moderators have not been researched sufficiently.
Considering the research question raised, how the characteristics of transformational leadership which are positively related to employee well-being are adopted in remote work environments, the key findings can be summarized: Leadership, regardless of which type, is more challenging in remote work conditions, yet crucial for employee well-being. Referring back to the model displaying the relationship of transformational leadership and employee well-being in face-to-face environments, it has been adapted for remote work environments, linking it to the relevant literature findings cited above.
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- Arbeit zitieren
- Judith Schmitt (Autor:in), 2021, The Impact of Transformational Leadership on Employee-Wellbeing in Remote Work Environments, München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1373563
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