RE-SU-LEAD: Rewarding and Sustainable health promoting Leadership
The aim of this project is two-fold: first, to find out which facets of leaders’ behaviour are of special importance to sustain the well-being and health of the team members or subordinates; second, to find out, if this behaviour can be successfully trained. Leaders’ behaviour is known to be one of the most common sources of work-related well-being or stress.
The study will be a combination of a longitudinal study including three waves and an intervention study. The first wave of the longitudinal study will deliver the basic data to develop a training program that is specific to the situation of each organization taking part in this field study. The second and third wave as well as the intervention design will help to establish a causal link between leader’s behaviour and subordinates’ well-being and health. Because leadership is considered to be an interactional process, situational, team, and organisational characteristics will be included in the research design. As sick leaves due to mental health problems have dramatically increased in the past few years, we focus on early indicators of well-being and health impairments (e.g. satisfaction, fatigue, irritation).
The training program will be developed based on the results of the first wave of the longitudinal study and on the continuous evaluation of the training program. The training will cover a time-frame of 16 months and will take place on the job. Not only leaders, but also their teams and their supervisors will be involved at certain phases of the program. The training program is expected to yield sustainable effects, that is, effects that hold on after the end of the training. To support sustainable effects also characteristics of the leaders’ and their subordinates’ work, like workload and decision latitude, will be the target of the intervention. We assume a feedback loop that sustains changes in leaders’ behaviour because decreased sick leaves of the subordinates should reduce workload of the leaders.
Data will be gathered in three countries, in cooperation between work and organizational psychologists from Sweden (Märlardalens högskola, Prof. Dr. K. Isaksson, Kerstin.isaksson@mdh.se ), Finland (University of Tampere, Prof. Dr. U. Kinnunen, Ulla.kinnuen@uta.fi ) and Germany (coordinator: University of Leipzig, Dr. Otto, kathleen.otto@uni-leipzig.de, Dr. Rigotti, Prof. Dr. Mohr). This allows not only a broader generalization of the results but also cross-national comparisons.
