Does Leadership Style Influence Health Status of Leaders, and Is It a New Determinant of Health?

Abstract

Introduction: The discourse of health and leadership has not empirically established whether leadership styles (transactional, transformational, and laissez-faire) is a health determinant.
 Objective: This study seeks to examine whether selected demographic characteristics and leadership styles are factors of self-reported general health status.
 Methods and materials: A standardized questionnaire was developed to evaluate whether or not leadership styles are correlated with health status and if this should be included as a new health determinant. This was administered between August and September 2019. The population for this research was leaders who serve in Seventh-day Adventist Churches in Central Jamaica. Statistical significance was determined a p-value less than or equal to five percentage points (≤ 0.05)– two-tailed test. Multivariate analyzing (logistic binary regression) was used to model factors influencing the good health status of the sampled respondents, and exploratory factor was used to determine the suitability of the indexations such as leadership styles and self-reported health status.
 Results: Three variables emerged as statistically significant predictors of self-reported good health status of leaders (transformational leadership: OR=19.241, 95%CI: 3.225-114.8, R2=47.6%; Transactional leadership: OR=0.143, 95%CI: 0.31-0.664; and age of respondents: OR=0.954, 95%CI: 0.911-0.999). Based on the Nagelkerke R Square, 48% of the variance in good health is explained by age, transactional and transformational leadership styles.
 Conclusion: Leadership style is a potential determinant of health (social determinant) that offers further explanation of people’s well-being (health) that cannot be discounted any longer.
 Keywords: Health determinants, transactional leadership, transformational leadership, laisses-faire leadership