Leadership Research Summary:
- This study introduces the notion of engaging leadership and reviews the empirical work done so far. Engaging leadership is defined as leadership behavior that facilitates, strengthens, connects and inspires employees in order to increase their work engagement. It can be measured with a reliable and valid self-report scale. As predicted by Self-Determination Theory, on which the concept of engaging leadership is based, basic need satisfaction mediates the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement. This is true both for individual employees as well as the team level. In addition, job characteristics (job demands and job resources) seem to play a similar mediating role, just as personal resources. Furthermore, research shows that engaging leadership has a beneficial effect on individual and team performance which illustrates its relevance for organizations. Future research should focus, amongst others, on the opposite of engaging leadership (i.e., disengaging leadership) and interventions to foster engaging leadership. Moreover, alternative affective, cognitive and behavioral pathways should be explored that might play a role in addition to the motivational (through need fulfillment) and material (through job characteristics) pathways that have been investigated so far.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci, 2017; Ryan et al., 2021) is a general motivation theory, which has been studied in the context of school, education and sports as well as at work. Unlike most other motivational theories, the emphasis is not so much on the strength of motivation, but on its quality. According to SDT, high-quality motivation arises when three basic psychological needs are satisfied. First, the need for autonomy, which refers to the desire to be able to act psychologically freely. Employees feel autonomous when they can decide for themselves and make their own choices. Second, the need for competence, which refers to the desire to deal effectively with the environment. Employees feel competent when they can learn and develop, allowing them to adapt flexibly to what the work demands of them. Third, the need for relatedness, which refers to the desire to build positive relationships with others, to feel loved and cared for, and to care for others oneself. Employees feel connected when they are part of a close-knit team that supports each other and shares personal feelings and thoughts.
- According to SDT, these three basic needs are innate and are, as it were, ingrained in human nature. It is therefore not a question of whether these needs are present or not—after all, everyone possesses them—but to what extent they are satisfied. SDT posits that the satisfaction of these basic needs is just as essential for optimal psychological functioning of people as food is necessary for their physical health. When these three basic needs are met, high-quality motivation—in SDT dubbed autonomous motivational regulation—exists that ensures optimal functioning of employees, both in terms of well-being and performance. To what extent basic needs are actually satisfied ultimately depends on the work context, which “nurtures” these needs, as it were.
- Employees experience that their work is meaningful when they feel that their contribution makes a difference. Frankl (1946) and Baumeister (1991) have convincingly argued that the need for meaning can be considered a basic human need as well. It seems that particularly in the public sector (e.g., among teachers and health care workers), meaningful work is important for work engagement (Mostafa and El-Motalib, 2018). In SDT, the basic need for meaning is implicitly understood as part of the need for autonomy. After all, true psychological freedom (autonomy) only exists when choices and decisions are based upon one’s own personal values. If I can only choose from alternatives that are not meaningful to me—i.e., don’t align with my own personal values—I will feel compelled to do something I don’t really want to. From interviews with employees, we learned that performing meaningful work was very important to them and that leaders could stimulate meaningfulness by inspiring them. They can do this, for example, by enthusing their followers for a certain vision, mission, idea or plan and by acknowledging their personal contribution to the overall goal of the team or the organization. In short, inspiring leaders satisfy their employees’ need for meaningfulness.
- Engaging leadership bears a certain resemblance to transformational leadership (Bass, 1985), which is currently the most frequently studied leadership concept. Transformational leadership also consists of four aspects; (1) inspiration, i.e., motivation through charisma; (2) intellectual stimulation, i.e., encouraging innovation and creativity; (3) idealized personal influence, i.e., acting as a role model; (4) individual consideration, i.e., coaching, support and advice. The first two leadership behaviors more or less correspond to inspiring and facilitating, respectively, of engaging leadership. However, acting as a role model and individual consideration are not part of engaging leadership.
- Rather than merely exhibiting exemplary behaviors as a role model, engaging leadership is about actively stimulating employees’ sense of autonomy, competence, relatedness and meaning. Furthermore, engaging leadership is about team consideration (i.e., stimulating connectedness and togetherness of team members), instead of individual consideration (i.e., personal support assistance and advice), as is the case with transformational leadership. Conversely, connecting and strengthening (promoting employee’s strengths and talents), are not included in transformational leadership. A recent meta-analysis found a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.42) between transformational leadership and work engagement across 86 studies (DeCuypere and Schaufeli, 2021).
- In summary, engaging leadership is defined as leadership behavior that facilitates, strengthens, connects and inspires employees in order to increase their work engagement. By facilitating, strengthening, connecting and inspiring, the employees’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, growth, connectedness and meaning are satisfied, respectively, which in their turn, increases their work engagement.