Engaging Leadership: Its relationship with follower's work engagement and job outcomes at the individual and team level

Leaders can positively influence their followers’ work engagement, both directly by the effect of the quality of their relationship as well as indirectly through their influence on the availability of job resources for their followers. Leaders provide a resourceful work environment that fulfills followers’ basic psychological needs, which in turn, enhances follower’s work engagement. It is argued that by satisfying basic psychological needs, leaders enhance the levels of engagement of their followers. Engaging leaders who inspire, strengthen, connect and empower their followers promote the fulfillment of follower’s basic psychological needs for meaningfulness, competence, relatedness, and autonomy, respectively, thereby increasing their levels of work engagement.
The aim of this PhD project is to probe the relationship between engaging leadership, work engagement and performance measured with multiple indicators (i.e. learning, innovation, intra-role and extra-role behavior) at the individual and team level of analysis. The first objective is to build a conceptual framework of engaging leadership and probe the engaging leadership-work engagement relationship. The second objective is to probe the engaging leadership, work engagement and performance relationships at the individual and team level of analysis. The motivational process that is described by the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R), as well as the Self-Determination Theory were used to theoretically frame the studies in this dissertation. The objectives of this PhD project are addressed in six chapters starting with an introductory chapter that explains the concept of engaging leadership and outlines the overall research model of this PhD project.
Chapter 2 presents Study 1 addressing the questions: “Does basic need satisfaction mediate the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement?” and “Is the proposed mediation model invariant across national samples (from Indonesia and Russia)?” A series of multigroup analyses with a cross-sectional design provided strong evidence for the validity of the research model that assumes a mediating role of basic need satisfaction in the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement in both countries.
Chapter 3 contains Study 2 addressing the question: “Do job resources in addition to basic need satisfaction mediate the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement?” Study 2 expands the first study by using a longitudinal design and a broader conceptual framework, which also includes job resources (i.e., the JD-R model) – in addition to the satisfaction of basic psychological needs – as an explanatory mechanism linking engaging leadership with work engagement. Structural equation modeling was used to test the mediation hypotheses, using a two-wave longitudinal design in an Indonesian sample of 412 employees. The results suggested that engaging leadership predicts an increase in work engagement across a one-year period, both directly as well as indirectly through job resources and subsequent basic needs satisfaction.
Chapter 4 contains Study 3 introducing diuwongke (Javanese-Indonesian term that refers to the feeling of being treated with respect) and seeking to answer the question: “Is the relationship between engaging leadership and work engagement moderated by diuwongke? This cross-sectional study included 607 employees and partly confirmed the moderation hypothesis; only employees with average and low levels of diuwongke seem to benefit from engaging leadership in the sense that for them this is associated with higher levels of work engagement.
Chapter 5 contains Study 4 addressing the question: “Does engaging leadership increase the level of collective team engagement, which, in its turn, is followed by an increased level of team outcomes (i.e., team learning, team innovation, and team performance)? In addition, the cross-level effect of engaging leadership and collective, team work engagement on individual work engagement and individual work performance, was investigated. A multilevel longitudinal study was conducted among 224 blue collar employees nested in 54 teams, working in an Indonesian state-owned agro-industrial company. The findings of this study showed that at the team level – as predicted – engaging leadership was positively related to team learning and team innovation, through team work engagement. Across levels – and again as predicted – engaging leadership at team level was positively related to individual job performance, employee learning, and innovative work behavior, also via work engagement. Finally, in Chapter 6 the main results of the four empirical studies are summarized and integrated, and the theoretical and practical implications as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the PhD project are discussed.