Linking authentic leadership to positive employee health, behavioral engagement, and job performance

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the emerging field of positive organizational behavior. The field of Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) has its roots in the concept of positive psychology (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008) but is more narrowly defined as the study and application of positively oriented human resources strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement in today\u27s workplace (Luthans, 2002, p.698). More and more researchers have begun to emphasize what is right with people rather than focusing on what is wrong with people. Given this opportunity, this dissertation explicitly focuses upon the power of positive psychological states and behaviors, such as psychological safety, job engagement, positive employee health, and proactive behaviors, which may have strong influence on employees\u27 behavior in the organization. A new emerging leadership style, authentic leadership, was employed as an important antecedent to see how leadership can promote these positive states and behaviors. Based on Ryff\u27s (1995) positive human health concepts, this dissertation developed a positive employee health construct which focuses on organizational context and environments. A four dimensional measure was developed for this construct, including leading a purposeful worklife, quality connection to others, positive self-regard and mastery, and perception of negative events. An initial nomological network was tested for the construct validity. In addition to developing a valid measure for positive employee health, another objective of this dissertation is to examine incremental predictive validity of authentic leadership and the relationship between authentic leadership and several previously unexamined outcomes (i.e., positive employee health, job engagement, proactivity, job performance, and workplace deviance behavior). Many scholars believe that the influence of authentic leadership has an important role in modern organization and society because it helps to restore basic confidence, hope, optimism, resiliency, and meaningfulness. This dissertation adopted a positive organizational behavior approach to furthering our understanding of the process by which authentic leadership influences several important positive outcomes. Findings of this dissertation indicated that newly developed positive employee health construct is useful in predicting job satisfaction and life satisfaction. It is significantly related to but also distinguished from other similar construct, such as psychological well-being and vigor. In addition, this dissertation also found that authentic leadership can be used to predict employees\u27 psychological safety, job engagement, positive employee health, knowledge sharing, and workplace deviance behavior. Indirect relationships between authentic leadership and job performance and proactivity through the mediation effect of job engagement were partially supported. Although authentic leadership can be distinguished from transformational leadership, it only showed incremental predict validity over transformational leadership with job engagement as outcome. Results of this study also suggest that need for leadership and perception of organizational politics may work as direct outcomes of authentic leadership rather than moderators as proposed

Gender and Leadership: an Approach to the Differences between Women and Men in Management

When a group of persons begins to interact, various differences between the members begin to appear. The pattern of relationships change according to the nature of the task and the most influential person became to be the leader. The aim of the present work is study whether men and women leader are fundamentally different or similar, reviewing the different relationships that exist when a group agrees a division of labour, roles, and responsibilities. It is also important to explore how the way of leadership influences the evolution of the whole group. Leaders must be chosen because of the characteristics that they possess. They should be seen as best suited to lead in particular situations and when negotiation and diplomacy are needed, interpersonal skills may outweigh the value of a dominant leader. In line with these, traditional feminine behaviour could be favoured in new business scenarios

Voice Flows To And Around Leaders: Understanding When Units Are Helped Or Hurt By Employee Voice

In two studies, we develop and test theory about the relationship between speaking up, one type of organizational citizenship behavior, and unit performance by accounting for where employee voice is flowing. Results from a qualitative study of managers and professionals across a variety of industries suggest that voice to targets at different formal power levels (peers or superiors) and locations in the organization (inside or outside a focal unit) differs systematically in terms of its usefulness in generating actions to a unit's benefit on the issues raised and in the likely information value of the ideas expressed. We then theorize how distinct voice flows should be differentially related to unit performance based on these core characteristics and test our hypotheses using time-lagged field data from 801 employees and their managers in 93 units across nine North American credit unions. Results demonstrate that voice flows are positively related to a unit's effectiveness when they are targeted at the focal leader of that unitwho should be able to take actionwhether from that leader's own subordinates or those in other units, and negatively related to a unit's effectiveness when they are targeted at coworkers who have little power to effect change. Together, these studies provide a structural framework for studying the nature and impact of multiple voice flows, some along formal reporting lines and others that reflect the informal communication structure within organizations. This research demonstrates that understanding the potential performance benefits and costs of voice for leaders and their units requires attention to the structure and complexity of multiple voice flows rather than to an undifferentiated amount of voice.Business Administratio

Organization Development for Social Change

The field of organization development (OD) has emerged from efforts to improve the performance of organizations, largely in the for-profit sector but more recently in the public and not-for-profit sectors as well. This paper examines how OD concepts and tools can be used to solve problems and foster constructive change at the societal level as well. It examines four areas in which OD can make such contributions: (1) strengthening social change-focused organizations, (2) scaling up the impacts of such agencies, (3) creating new inter-organizational systems, and (4) changing contexts that shape the action of actors strategic to social change. It discusses examples and the kinds of change agent roles and interventions that are important for each. Finally, it discusses some implications for organization development intervention, practitioners, and the field at large.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 25. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Mentoring: Adding Value to Organizational Culture

Given that leadership is value-based and relationship-permeated, one asks how leaders can transfer personal and organizational value to employees. One answer to this is through mentoring. Mentoring young or inexperienced workers is an investment in the future of business, the school system, organizations, etc. Understanding this idea is difficult because current mentoring research demonstrates that mentoring is more convoluted than was once thought. This article will make an effort to untangle some of this research and then suggest a “common sense” and “practical” definition of “mentoring.” This is a definition that can be used in large and small businesses, in churches, schools, and by community organizations. In our conclusion, we summarize the research examined: The characteristics of a mentor The characteristics of a mentor-protégé relationship A description of the mentoring process A simple definition of “mentoring” that is widely applicabl

A silent cry for leadership : organizing for leading (in) clusters

Leadership research so far has neglected clusters as a particular context for leadership, while research on networks and clusters has hardly studied leadership issues. This paper fills this dual gap in the abundant research on leadership on the one hand and on networks/clusters on the other by investigating leadership in photonics clusters from a structuration perspective. Apart from giving an insight into the variety and patterns of leadership practices observed, the paper addresses the dilemma that regional innovation systems such as clusters usually have a critical need of some kind of leadership, but that neither individual nor organizational actors wish to be led. This dilemma can only be ‘managed’ by organizing for leading (in) clusters in a certain way

ILR Research in Progress 2011-12

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.Research_in_Progress_2011_12.pdf: 46 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics

Emergence of Leadership in Communication

We study a neuro-inspired model that mimics a discussion (or information dissemination) process in a network of agents. During their interaction, agents redistribute activity and network weights, resulting in emergence of leader(s). The model is able to reproduce the basic scenarios of leadership known in nature and society: laissez-faire (irregular activity, weak leadership, sizable inter-follower interaction, autonomous sub-leaders); participative or democratic (strong leadership, but with feedback from followers); and autocratic (no feedback, one-way influence). Several pertinent aspects of these scenarios are found as well---e.g., hidden leadership (a hidden clique of agents driving the official autocratic leader), and successive leadership (two leaders influence followers by turns). We study how these scenarios emerge from inter-agent dynamics and how they depend on behavior rules of agents---in particular, on their inertia against state changes.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure