Search results

Investigating the role of leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic in maintaining the well-being and performance of the medical personnel, as frontline workers, is of major importance. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between engaging leadership in health care during COVID-19 pandemic and followers’ work engagement and performance and to test the mediating role of followers’ basic psychological need satisfaction in these relationships.

A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample consisting of 200 health-care employees. Data were collected starting with May 2020 and ending with November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants reported on the engaging leadership of their direct supervisor and on their own psychological need satisfaction, work meaningfulness, work engagement and quality of care.

The positive association between engaging leadership and followers’ work engagement was fully mediated by followers’ basic needs satisfaction. The relationship between engaging leadership and followers’ quality of patient care was not supported. Work meaningfulness did not mediate the link between engaging leadership and followers’ engagement.

By meeting followers’ needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, engaging leaders can stimulate followers’ work engagement during outbreaks and other similar crises. Managers in health care may maintain a high level of followers’ work engagement during crises if they adopt an engaging leadership style.

The study investigated for the first time the role of meeting the psychological needs of health-care workers by leaders during a health-care crisis.

The objective of this study was to investigate the link between ethical leadership and followers’ job crafting. Based on social learning theory and the job demands-resources model, we expected that followers’ role-breadth self-efficacy and work engagement would serially mediate the association between this leadership style and followers’ job crafting.

A quantitative analysis was conducted among a sample of 458 subordinates that assessed the ethical leadership of their direct supervisor and reported on their own role-breadth self-efficacy, engagement and job crafting behaviours.

Ethical leadership was positively associated with followers’ increasing structural resources, increasing social resources and increasing challenging demands. The mediation hypothesis was supported for increasing challenging demands but not for increasing social resources. Results unexpectedly suggested that the indirect positive effect suppresses the direct negative effect of ethical leadership on followers’ increasing structural resources, the total effect becoming positive. This leadership style was not associated with followers’ decreasing hindering demands.

The research highlights the possibility that ethical leadership trainings may stimulate followers' job crafting.

The study explores for the first time the relationship between this leadership style and job crafting behaviours of subordinates and, moreover, provides an explanatory mechanism for the relationship between these variables.