Workers are not doing well. Employees report rising rates of burnout worldwide, even as many organizations seek to add programs and resources such as counseling, more paid time off, and free access to meditation apps doing.
Your ongoing distress may be because none of these steps directly address one of the things that has the greatest impact on your well-being: your boss. Research is now identifying the specific leadership styles that make the biggest difference. It also revealed that increasing positive management tactics can be as important as minimizing bad leadership.
This research Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, outlines results from an analysis of 53 studies that tested how leadership style affects employee mental health. By analyzing results across studies, this meta-analysis provides much stronger evidence than a single study. Previous research has established a link between leadership style and mental health, but this new effort goes further. Which Style makes the biggest difference. Researchers looked at both the positive effects of helpful styles and the negative effects of unhelpful styles.
Scientists compared seven different leadership styles. The most common is transactional, where bosses focus on consistently rewarding or punishing people based on their performance. Another common style is laissez-faire. This is mostly done by administrators leaving employees on their own devices. Analysis showed that, of the seven styles, his two styles had the greatest impact on employee well-being.
Managers who adopted innovative leadership styles had the greatest positive impact on employee mental health. First defined in the early 1970s, transformative leaders inspire others by envisioning, inspiring creative thinking in their team members, and tailoring their approach to each employee’s individual needs. give This style yielded much more positive results, as measured by the employees’ own reports of happiness. , and defeated relationship- and task-oriented leadership styles that emphasize support and efficiency, respectively.
Conversely, researchers also found that destructive leadership styles, in which bosses behaved aggressively and hostilely, had the greatest negative impact on employee mental health. For those who have, it doesn’t come as a surprise, but there was still a twist to the analysis. In many psychological studies, scientists have found that “bad things are stronger than good things” in most people’s minds. People generally think that truly terrible bosses are far more harmful than inspirational leaders are beneficial. I expected the positive effect to be significantly greater. Instead, we found that transformative leadership was just as powerful at explaining positive mental health outcomes as disruptive leadership was at explaining negative outcomes.
This has powerful implications. This suggests that making average leaders better (specifically, by enabling them to be more transformative) has as much positive impact as minimizing disruptive leadership. It means that there is a possibility. To clarify, companies should work to eliminate toxic behavior in their managers. However, research shows that increasing the number of transformative leaders again It’s a top priority for businesses. Doing so may be just as effective as pouring money into programs such as stress reduction and mindfulness resources. Given its frequent use, improving leadership through training, for example, could be a stronger intervention.
Employee mental health is improved by enabling managers to identify specific behaviors and attitudes to adopt or avoid. Better management leads to a healthier organizational culture overall and reinforces what good leadership looks like and what kinds of behavior are unacceptable. And that change could be the beginning of a virtuous cycle. Over time, a healthy culture attracts better employees and better leaders.
Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology, and have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper you’d like to contribute to Mind Matters? Send your suggestions to Scientific Americanby Mind Matters Editor Daisy Juhas pitchmindmatters@gmail.com.
This is an opinion and analysis article and views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily Scientific American.
