Leadership Research Summary:
- The extant studies on leadership are replete with employee, coworker, and leader outcomes, however, research is still nascent on leadership’s crossover into employees’ family members’ lives.
- To examine leadership’s impact on the work–family interface, the study draws on conservation of resources theory (COR) and crossover theory and investigate how authoritarian leadership and benevolent leadership affect spousal family satisfaction.
- The study examined the mediating influence of work–family conflict (WFC) and work-family facilitation (WFF), and the moderating impact of spouses’ need for control. Our model was tested with multisource, mutiwave data from 207 Chinese married dyads.
- The results suggest that, as expected, the positive relationship between benevolent leadership and spousal family satisfaction is fully mediated by WFF, and the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and spousal family satisfaction is fully mediated by WFC.
- Findings further suggest that the negative relationship between employee WFC and spousal family satisfaction is stronger for spouses with a higher need for control. Thus, authoritarian leadership, through its negative influence on WFC appears to be universally detrimental for spousal family satisfaction, however, even more so for spouses with a higher need for control. These results underscore the importance of acknowledging leadership’s impact at work reaching far beyond the job incumbent.
Leadership Research Findings:
- Practical implications of the present study are attainable because leadership behaviors are within the control of organizations. This study demonstrates the positive impact of benevolent leadership on both the employee (through work-family facilitation) and the spouse. Although our study was based in China, previous research supports the positive impact of benevolent leadership on LMX and affective organizational commitment in the Western business context (Pellegrini et al., 2010).
- Findings also demonstrate the negative impact of authoritarian leadership on both the employee (through work–family conflict) as well as the employee’s spouse. Given the negative dual impact of authoritarian leadership, what can organizations do?
- First, organizations should carefully monitor and manage leaders’ authoritarian tendencies to avoid or reduce their negative dual impact on employees and spouses, who may also be employees of another business organization. Leaders need to be trained to understand the potential far-reaching negative impacts of authoritarian behaviors.
- Authoritarian leaders should be encouraged to reflect on and recognize their behaviors, learn to decrease their tight control over employees, and adopt benevolent leadership as a model by providing more personalized career and personal support to employees. Authoritarian leaders could attend leadership training programs geared toward self-awareness and learning to become more well-rounded leaders who can help employees thrive both on and off-the-job domains.
- Second, when employees experience authoritarian leadership, they should be particularly mindful of not carrying their work-related stressors into the family domain. Employees might also find counseling helpful to obtain guidance in coping strategies that they can use to maintain harmony between their work and family lives (Bodenmann et al., 2008).
- These counseling sessions could be subsidized by employers to encourage employees build the necessary skills for an effective work-life balance. Employees and their partners should recognize that their relationship may be affected by positive and negative spillover from each other’s work domains.
- Third, organizations need to expend more time and effort and take timely measures to reduce work–family conflict spillover to the family. They should also do more to support dual careers since the negative spillover from work–family conflict may be amplified for employees whose partners also work outside the home. The continuing growth of dual careers has implications for attraction, retention, and overall talent management.
- Companies that are at the forefront of recognizing the broader impact on diversity in their workforce and improved sense of work-life balance for employees and their spouses, may reap first-mover benefits in creating a work environment that attracts and retains the best talent.
- For example, organizations may create a resource-abundant work environment by providing flexible work schedules, infusing jobs with greater autonomy, and promoting practices that encourage employees to be empowered (Ford et al., 2007). In these settings, employees would be more likely to attain work-family facilitation, which would in turn support employees’ and their spouses’ well-being (Taylor et al., 2009; Carlson et al., 2011).
- In turn, supportive practices should increase the organization’s competitiveness in talent attraction and retention because millennials view work-life balance more as integration, rather than equilibrium, and they actively seek work roles that allow them to thrive outside of work (Miller and Yar, 2019; Alesso-Bendisch, 2020).