Lundmark, R., Nielsen, K. orcid.org/0000-0001-9685-9570, Hasson, H. et al. (2 more authors) (2020) No leader is an island : contextual antecedents to line managers’ constructive and destructive leadership during an organizational intervention. International Journal of Workplace Health Management, 13 (2). pp. 173-188. ISSN 1753-8351
Abstract
Purpose: Line managers can make or break organizational interventions, yet little is known about what makes them turn in either direction. As leadership does not occur in a vacuum it has been suggested that the organizational context plays an important role. Building on the intervention and leadership literature, we examine if span of control and employee readiness for change are related to line managers’ leadership during an organizational intervention.
Design: Leadership is studied in terms of intervention-specific constructive, as well as passive and active forms of destructive, leadership behaviors. As a sample, we use employees (N = 172) from 37 groups working at a process industry plant. Multilevel analyses over two time points, with both survey and organizational register data were used to analyze the data.
Findings: The results revealed that span of control was negatively related to constructive leadership and positively related to passive destructive leadership during the intervention. Employee readiness for change was positively related to constructive leadership, and negatively related to both passive and active destructive leadership.
Practical implications: Our findings suggest that contextual factors need to be assessed and considered if we want line managers to engage in constructive rather than destructive leadership during interventions.
Originality/value: The present study is the first to address line managers’ making or breaking of organizational interventions by examining the influence of context on both their destructive and constructive leadership.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 Emerald Publishing Limited. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in International Journal of Workplace Health Management. This version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. |
Keywords: | Leadership; Span of control; Readiness for change; Organizational intervention; Contextual antecedents |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 Feb 2020 12:19 |
Last Modified: | 10 Dec 2021 10:41 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Emerald |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1108/IJWHM-05-2019-0065 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:157249 |