Leadership Research Summary:
• It is widely acknowledged that leadership is crucial for follower health. Under stress, positive leader behaviors such as transformational leadership may decrease and the risk of negative behaviors such as abusive leadership may increase. Followers experience these discrepancies in leadership between routine and stressful periods as inconsistent. While positive and negative leadership is generally associated with follower strain, inconsistency may be stressful by itself, because it entails insecurity and unpredictability in the leader-follower relationship.
• Researchers suggest that the level of perceived inconsistency and volatility in leaders’ behavior across situations is an additional risk factor for follower health. Moreover, we expect perceived inconsistency to be stronger when leaders are strained. This survey study with N = 304 employees examines the relationships between leadership inconsistency and leader as well as follower strain from a followers’ perspective. Participants rated their leaders’ transformational and abusive leadership separately for routine and stressful conditions, their leaders’ strain and their own strain.
• Employees who experienced stronger discrepancies in leadership between routine and stressful conditions, i.e., more inconsistency, experienced more strain. Moreover, from a followers’ perspective, inconsistencies were stronger when leaders were strained. The findings provide evidence that leadership is less stable and consistent than generally assumed and that inconsistency is an additional risk factor. Leader strain may threaten the consistency of leadership and thereby negatively affect follower health.
Leadership Research Implications & Conclusions:
• In line with previous research, our findings support the notion that leadership is contingent on the situation, as perceived transformational leadership was higher and abusive leadership was lower in stressful periods (Geier, 2016; Klebe et al., 2021). Especially inconsistencies in abusive leadership, even on a small scale, seem to affect followers rather than inconsistencies in positive behavior. Our findings have important implications for the emerging research field of leadership inconsistency: First, the fact that followers perceive systematic differences in leadership depending on the presence of stress shows that behavioral styles may not be as stable as research often implies (Montano et al., 2017).
• Second, and most importantly, not just the leadership style itself, but also perceptions of consistency seem to be relevant for follower strain, supporting previous findings (Mullen et al., 2011; Breevaart and Zacher, 2019). Still, further theory development is needed to conceptualize consistency and inconsistency in leadership. In the study, leaders differed in the degree of perceived consistency, reflected in the extent of differences between normal and stressful conditions.
• Yet one may also raise the question whether the study still captures inconsistency when followers observe systematic differences, as these differences reflect inconsistency across situations, but consistency within persons. Thus, the understanding of leadership inconsistency may also reflect a stable inconsistent behavior within persons. In contrast, behavioral changes from leaders that seem completely arbitrary and follow no discernable pattern may reflect a different quality of inconsistent leadership and elicit different reactions.
• Furthermore, our findings underline leader strain as a risk factor for leadership quality and consistency, as well as for follower health. Keeping leaders in a good state of health may not only lead to a stabilization of leadership, but also prevent followers from experiencing negative leadership and in turn psychological strain. In order to better understand how and why leader strain may lead to deteriorating leadership, further theory development should take a differentiated view on specific stressors, such as time pressure or the general workload of leaders to identify potential risk situations and to enable leaders and organizations to counteract at an early stage.
• Regarding practical implications, findings suggest that organizations should be aware of the links between leadership and strain and consequently consider leader health in personnel development efforts. Organizations should make leaders aware of their responsibilities for their own as well as their followers’ health, including potential crossover of their own strain (Franke et al., 2014; Krick et al., 2021). Hence, organizations should ideally integrate leadership trainings with occupational health promotion (Kelloway and Barling, 2010), fostering leaders’ health awareness and well-being.
• The study’s findings indicate that problems related to strain crossover to employees, and poor leadership cannot simply be resolved by selecting stress-resistant persons for leadership positions. By investing in leaders’ health and their resources to cope with stress appropriately, organizations can help to prevent deteriorating leadership and inconsistencies, which would also account for follower health.