Leading with Meaning: Investigating the Role of Leader Work Meaningfulness
Type
fundamental research project
Start Date
June 1, 2015
End Date
May 31, 2017
Status
ongoing
Keywords
Leadership
work meaningfulness
health
firm performance
Description
Leaders are managers of meaning. A fundamental task of transformational leaders is to infuse employees' work with meaningfulness and shape employees' perception of work as positive and significant. However, we know very little about leaders' own work meaningfulness. In particular, further research is needed to answer the following questions: (1) How and when does leader work meaningfulness trickle down to follower work meaningfulness? (2) What are the key factors which determine leader work meaningfulness? (3) Which influences do leaders' aggregate quality and strength of work meaningfulness have on a firm's leadership climate and firm performance? (4) Does too much of leader work meaningfulness harm leaders' health and ultimately firm performance?
Member contributor(s)
Funder
Topic(s)
Leadership
work meaningfulness
health
firm performance
Method(s)
large-scale survey studies
interviews
Range
Institute/School
Range (De)
Institut/School
Division(s)
Eprints ID
223335
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Item type:Publication, Developing authentic leaders in business schools: A coaching intervention study(2017-08-08); - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Leading With Meaning: How And When Leader Work Meaningfulness Transfers To Followers(2016-01-07); - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, A moral competency approach to ethical consumption(2017-05-11); Bagozzi, RichardType:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Killing meaning: Leaders' impact on the erosion of followers' meaning at work(2018-05-11); Kark, RonitType:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, When dreams meet reality: A qualitative investigation of entrepreneurs pursuing their passion in the video game industry(2016-08-05); Khapova, Svetlana N.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Trickle down effects of work meaningfulness through visionary leadership(2015-08-07); - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The impact of family management on employee well-being: A multilevel studyNon-family employees are an important resource in family firms; therefore, understanding their well-being is of utmost relevance for management theory. Integrating leadership theory into family business research, we draw from the emotional contagion and person-organization fit theories and argue that employee well-being in terms of organizational-level affective climate and individual-level job satisfaction is higher in firms managed by a family CEO. Moreover, we hypothesize that this relationship becomes stronger with higher levels of CEO transformational leadership and weaker with increasing CEO tenure. We test our hypotheses using a large-scale, multilevel dataset comprising 2,246 direct reports of the respective CEO and 41,531 employees from 497 family- and non-family-managed firms. By applying multilevel modeling, we found support for our proposed hypotheses. Post-hoc tests reveal that the positive effect of family management is particularly strong in first generation family firms. This article contributes to research on leadership and on family firms and advances the evidence-based debate about employees in those firms.Type:journal articleJournal:Academy of Management ProceedingsScopus© Citations 5 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, ‘Killing me softly with his/her song’: How leaders dismantle followers’ sense of work meaningfulnessLeaders influence followers’ meaning and play a key role in shaping their employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. While the dominant perspective in theory and in empirical work focuses on the positive influence of leaders on followers’ work meaningfulness, our conceptual model explores conditions in which leaders may harm followers’ sense of meaning. We introduce six types of conditions, i.e. leaders’ personality traits, leaders’ behaviors, the relationship between leader and follower, followers’ attributions, followers’ characteristics, and job design under which leaders’ meaning making efforts might harm or ‘kill’ followers’ sense of work meaningfulness. Accordingly, we explore how these conditions may interact with leaders’ meaning making efforts to lower levels of followers’ sense of meaning, and in turn, lead to negative personal outcomes (i.e., cynicism, lower well-being, and disengagement), as well as negative organizational outcomes (i.e., corrosive organizational energy, higher turnover rates, and lower organizational productivity). By doing so, our research extends the current literature, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of leaders’ influence on followers’ work meaningfulness, while considering the dark side of meaning making.Type:journal articleJournal:Frontiers in psychology - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The Impact of Customer Contact on Collective Human Energy in FirmsThis paper investigates how and when a firm’s level of customer contact influences the collective organizational energy. For this purpose, we bridge the literature on collective human energy at work with the job impact framework and organizational sensemaking processes and argue that a firm’s level of customer contact is positively linked to the collective organizational energy because a high level of customer contact might make the experience of prosocial impact across the firm more likely. However, as prior research at the individual level has indicated that customers could also deplete employees’ energy, we introduce transformational leadership climate as a novel contingency factor for this linkage at the organizational level. We propose that a medium to high transformational leadership climate is necessary to derive positive meaning from customer contact, while firms with a low transformational leadership climate do not get energized by customer contact. We tested the proposed moderated mediation model with multilevel modeling and a multi-source dataset comprising 9,094 employees and 75 key informants in 75 firms. The results support our hypotheses and offer important theoretical contributions for research on collective human energy in organizations and its interplay with customers.Type:journal articleJournal:Group & Organization ManagementVolume:44Issue:5Scopus© Citations 8 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Personal risk for social good. Yahya’s courageous career and leadership decisions(Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2017-05);