When Mindfulness Interacts With Neuroticism to Enhance Transformational Leadership: The Role of Psychological Need Satisfaction

Abstract

Transformational leadership is a popular and well-researched leadership style. Although much is understood about its positive consequences, less research has focused on antecedents of transformational leadership. In this research we draw upon self-determination theory and incorporate a self-regulatory approach to investigate if and how leader mindfulness influences transformational leadership. The analyses show that autonomy, competence and relatedness need satisfaction mediate between mindfulness and transformational leadership, indicating that mindfulness is associated with psychological need satisfaction. Furthermore, the data show that neuroticism moderates the relationship between mindfulness and relatedness need satisfaction. Generally speaking, the association between mindfulness and relatedness need satisfaction is positive. When neuroticism is also high, mindfulness has the largest impact. Or conversely, when emotional stability is high, mindfulness has the smallest association with relatedness need satisfaction. This is in line with evidence suggesting that mindfulness may primarily exert its influence through emotional self-regulation. Furthermore, the moderated mediation model for relatedness need satisfaction is significant, indicating that neuroticism is a boundary condition for the indirect effect of mindfulness on transformational leadership through relatedness need satisfaction.

Multilevel Impacts of Transformational Leadership on Service Quality: Evidence From China

“…Bass (1985) stated that transformational leaders focus on followers’ demands, motivate followers to realize the goals of the organization and encourage followers to pursue group interests and self-development. Recent research has found that mindfulness can positively influence TFL by fulfilling leaders’ need for autonomy, competence and relatedness (Decuypere et al, 2018). Transformational leaders achieve the aforementioned goals through their charisma or idealized influence, inspiration or inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration (Bass, 1985, 1995; Bass and Avolio, 1990).…”

Work-to-Family Spillover Effects of Workplace Negative Gossip: A Mediated Moderation Model

“…Following this theoretical logic, we suggest that when employees with different levels of neuroticism experience resource loss, they are more likely to show diverse perceptions of this adverse event, thus adopting differentiation strategy. More specifically, employees with high neuroticism act more sensitive to resource loss (i.e., WNG) for lack of psychological resources, and they are likely to constantly reinforce resource loss and magnify negative perceptions of themselves (Li et al, 2016;Lu et al, 2017;Decuypere et al, 2018). Consequently, they tend to be in the grip of psychological distress, such as anxiety, tension, and emotional instability.…”

Leader Mindfulness: Well-Being Throughout the Organization

“…In addition research shows that when the disposition for mindfulness is already high, training no longer has a major additional effect. So specifically if a leader is (1) rather distracted and is generally categorized as 'not mindful', or (2) scores high on neuroticism (Decuypere et al 2019), training can be an interesting investment (Feltman et al 2009).…”

“…It would also be interesting for future research to focus more on mapping the effect of mindfulness on the communication process between leaders and their employees (Decuypere et al 2019). Qualitative research shows that mindfulness helps to listen better and communicate more clearly (Kearney et al 2013;Frizzell et al 2016).…”