Leadership Style & Employee Engagement

Engagement is the measure of the Team's Emotional Commitment to their leader and it is critically important for the bottom line. From Create a Culture of Engagement in 2013, Video 05 is a creative presentation by Ken Wright - the founder of The Wright Coach and Engage4Results Pty Ltd describes employee engagement with leadership which covers many strategies a leader can implement immediately - they cost virtually nothing and are guaranteed to make people feel great about themselves -  which is the real secret to getting the best out of people and engaging them.

Video 5.0 : Leadership, Engage your team

(Source: Leadership - Engage your Team – Ken Wright, Create a Culture of Engagement, 2013)

According to Hewitt’s, (2014) employee engagement suggests that leaders hold the key to employee engagement. Leadership means inspiring people to do their best to achieve the desired results. It involves developing and communicating a vision for the future, inspiring people, and ensuring participation (Dixon ,1994).  Ex: Tim Cook is the CEO of the Apple. He took over Apple after the company’s founder, Steve Jobs. Cook has helped navigate Apple through the transition after Jobs’ death as well as developing new product lines and opening Apple retail stores in China (cmoe.com, 2020).

The organizations have been interested in the willingness of employees to dedicate themselves for leadership roles in the organization and how employees think and feel attached to their work (Ariani, 2014). It is understood that the organization wants to increase employee engagement, given that the engaged employees were willing to devote themselves fully in their work by way of a positive role (Kahn, 1990) and remain in them longer work (Saks, 2006; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Employee engagement concerns the extent to which individuals use all the resources of cognitive, emotional, and physical to perform roles associated with the job (Kahn, 1990; Xu & Thomas, 2011). Employees who feel committed and willing to engage in their work generally is the employee who has the characteristics of an energetic, fun, enjoyable, and effective in carrying out their work (Kahn, 1990; Macey & Schneider, 2008; Xu & Thomas, 2011). The high level of employee engagement is associated with increased return on assets, earnings of each employee higher, better performance, greater sales growth, lower absenteeism, reduced employee turnover, lower cost than the cost of goods, and error because the products are not diminishing quality (Salanova, Agut, and Piero, 2005; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004; Xu & Thomas, 2011).

Employee engagement is a concept that contains the value of the understanding and improvement of individual and organizational performance and can be influenced by the leader. In theory, the impact of leadership on employee engagement is a leadership style that is adopted to improve employee engagement at work. A leadership style can also improve employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and employee enthusiasm for work (Alok & Israel, 2012). Kahn (1990) suggested that an individual involved is a person who is close to the work-related tasks, so that the employee is willing to give you the ability and energy, and eager to work in an organization that should translate into a higher level of performance in accordance with the role played (in-role performance) and performance that are outside the role played (extra-role performance). When people dedicate themselves to the job role, the individual must have a higher contextual performance and related to the tendency of individuals to behave in a manner that facilitates the tendency to behave in accordance with social and psychological context of an organization (Christian, Garza, & Slaughter, 2011).

Leadership skills ( Dixon, 1994)

● Inspire others.

● Persuade others willingly to behave differently;

● Clarify what needs to be done and why;

● Communicate a sense of purpose to the team;

● According to (Tamkin et al, 2010), that leaders cannot create performance themselves but    are conduits for performance through their influence on others;

● Get the team into action so that the task is achieved.

Employee engagement and leadership supervision or support is very important for all organizations that promote organizational citizenship behaviour. According to Ariani, (2014) there are three reasons why this is an important concern.

First, Leadership influences followers, motivates them to participate in activities outside the business and curriculum, and enhances their ability to carry out these activities beyond expectations. This theoretical proposition has been empirically supported by Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, and Bacharach, 2000) and Podsakoff and Bommer (1996).

Second, leaders can influence followers by creating meaningful work (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993).

Third, employee perceptions of their work called employee engagement positively able to predict their organizational citizenship behaviour (Purvanova, Bono, & Dzieweczynski, 2006)

Video 06: 11 Things leaders say to drive Employee engagement

Source: Blessingwhite, A Division of GP strategies

According to Avey, Hughes, Norman, and Luthan (2008), leadership has a positive relationship with employee engagement. Leadership helps create an environment where employees can easily engage in organizational citizenship behaviour. Leader behaviour has a great impact on the results or performance of employees. Saks (2006)

Found a positive relationship between supervisor support and employee engagement. Theorist suggested that Social Exchange Theory may be able to provide insight on how leaders influence the results achieved by the organization. Social Exchange Theory suggests that employees will reciprocate the leader's behaviour towards them with their own behaviour and the presence of a suitable reciprocal relationship as part of a social exchange relationship development process (Soeib, Othman, & D ' Silva, 2013). Leader behaviour is a source of motivation and satisfaction for his men. Leadership also influences the attitude and performance of followers (Bycio, Hackett, & Allen, 1995). Leadership is an important element in the development of employee engagement.

Basic leadership styles :

According to Goleman, (2000) six styles of leadership: coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching (Table 1 collates a brief explanation of each style). This type is derived from research in the commercial field. Each style is based on some combination of emotional intelligence abilities. Although still controversial, to what extent EI affects effective leadership (Waterhouse, 2006) There is no doubt that there is a connection between emotional intelligence and effective leadership, at least in its changing style (Barling et al, 2000).

Table 1:  Goleman’s theory of leadership

Source : Based on Daniel Goleman (2002)

List of References:

 

Alok, Kumar and Israel, D. (2012). Authentic Leadership and Work Engagement. The Indian Journal of Individual Relations, 47(3): 498-510.

Aon Hewitt. (2014). Trends in global employee engagement. Retrieved 15 July 2015, from 2014-trends-in-globalemployee-engagement-report

Ariani, D. W. (2014) ‘Relationship Leadership, Employee Engagement, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior’, International Journal of Business and Social Research, 4(8), pp. 74–90. doi: 10.18533/ijbsr.v4i8.589.

Avey, James B.; Hughes, Larry W.; Norman, Steven M.; and Luthans, Kyle W. (2008). Using Positivity, Transformational Leadership, and Empowerment To Combat Employee Negativity. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 29(2): 110-126.

Barling J., Salter F., Kelloway E. K. (2000), Transformational leadership and EI: an exploratory study, “Leadership & Organizational Development Journal

Christian, Michael S.; Garza, Adela S.; and Slaughter, Jerel E. (2011). Work Engagement: A Quantitative Review and Test of Its Relations with Task and Contextual Performance. Personnel Psychology, 64(1): 84-136.

Dixon, N F (1994) On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, London, Pimlico

Gardner L., Stough C. (2002), Examining the relationship between leadership and emotional intelligence in senior level managers, “Leadership & Organization Development Journal

Goleman D. (2000), Leadership that gets results, “Harvard Business Review

Hay, M. (2002). Strategies for survival in the war of talent. Career Development International.

Kahn, William A. (1990). Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement of Work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4): 692-724.

Leadership - Engage your Team - Create a Culture of Engagement. (2013). [video] Directed by K. Wright. USA.

Purvanova, Radostina K.; Bono, Joyce E.; and Dzieweczynski, Jessica. (2006). Transformational Leadership, Job Characteristics, and Organizational Citizenship Performance. Human Performance, 19(1): 1-22.

Schaufeli, Wilmar B. and Bakker, Arnold B. (2004). Job Demands, Job Resources, and Their Relationship with Burnout and Engagement: A Multi Sample Study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(3): 293-315.

Shamir, Boas; House, Robert J.; and Arthur, Michael B. (1993). The Motivational Effects of Charismatic Leadership: A Self-Concept Based Theory. Organizational Science, 4(4): 577-594.

Tamkin, P, Pearson, G, Hirsh, W and Constable, S (2010) Exceeding Expectation: The principles of outstanding leadership, London, The Work Foundation.

Waterhouse L. (2006), Multiple Intelligences, the Mozart Effect, and Emotional Intelligence: A Critical Review, “Educational Psychologist.