Who takes the lead? A multi‐source diary study on leadership, work engagement, and job performance

Abstract

Summary Transformational leadership is associated with a range of positive outcomes. Yet, according to substitutes for leadership theory, there may be circumstances under which it is difficult, if not impossible, for leaders to inspire and challenge their employees. Therefore, we hypothesize that transformational leadership behaviors as well as employee self‐leadership strategies contribute to employee work engagement and job performance. Furthermore, we hypothesize that transformational leadership behaviors are more effective when employees have a high need for leadership, whereas self‐leadership strategies are more effective when employees have a low need for leadership. A sample of 57 unique leader–employee dyads filled out a quantitative diary survey at the end of each week, for a period of five weeks. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling showed that employees were more engaged in their work and received higher performance ratings from their leader when leaders used more transformational leadership behaviors, and when employees used more self‐leadership strategies. Furthermore, we showed that transformational leadership behaviors were more effective when employees had a high (vs. low) need for leadership and that the opposite was true for employee self‐leadership. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of employees in the transformational leadership process. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Two-Faced Leader: Effects of Leader Emotional Inconsistency on Follower Creative Performance

“…I used the general as well as weekly version of the LEIS as reported under section 8.3.2 to conduct a MCFA. The sole difference between the general and weekly version is the adaptation of the time frame of the respective items so that they referred to the weekly level (see Breevaart et al, 2016;Ohly et al, 2010 for a similar approach).…”

“…To resolve this apparent contradiction I decided to adopt a week-level approach for my investigation of leader emotional inconsistency, follower creative process engagement, and manager-rated creative performance. Past research has already started to investigate weekly fluctuations in leadership (Breevaart, Bakker, Demerouti, & Derks, 2016) as well as weekly fluctuations in idea generation and implementation (Madrid et al, 2014). Therefore, I am confident that adopting a week-level approach to investigate the effect of leader emotional inconsistency on follower creative performance does neither compromise the accuracy of follower ratings of leader behaviour nor the meaningfulness of manager ratings of follower creative performance and thus represents an adequate solution to overcome the aforementioned contradiction.…”

“…In line with previous research, the time frame of all scale items used has been adapted so that they referred to the week and could be used to measure my study variables on a weekly level (cf. Breevaart, Bakker, Demerouti, & Derks, 2016;Ohly, Sonnentag, Niessen, & Zapf, 2010). Internal consistencies for week-level variables were averaged across all measurement occasions.…”

Effects of Innovative Education on Innovation Capability and Organizational Performance in High-Tech Industry

“…By organizing the points of view from various studies, Aküzüm (2014) proposed that (1) organizational performance was the core of organization theory, (2) there was not a single performance indicator presenting distribution, (3) it was difficult to show consensus for performance indicators, (4) there were different performance indicators corresponding to various situations, and (5) theory orientation was replaced with problem-solving orientation (Koffel et al, 2016). Organizational performance presents complexity that the interpretation should contain multiple dimensions so that there are different definitions, measurement methods, and indicators of organizational performance for current applications and requirements (Breevaart et al, 2016). Peng et al (2014) suggested "job satisfaction", "organizational objective", and "job performance" as the measuring indicators of "organizational performance".…”

“…Tsai et al (2013) indicated that most small and medium enterprises did not practice innovative education; when traditional restrictions were eliminated to enhance innovative education, the innovation capability, flexible and rapid response capability, and information and communication capability could be promoted to further promote organizational performance. Breevaart et al (2016) argued the importance of innovative education that the application of innovative education could enhance efficiency and promote innovation capability and performance. The following hypothesis is therefore proposed in this study.…”