Margaret C. McKee

Transformational Leadership and Psychological Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Meaningful Work

Two studies investigated the relationship between transformational leadership, the meaning that individuals ascribe to their work, and their psychological well-being. In Study 1, the perceptions of meaningful work partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and positive affective well-being in a sample of Canadian health care workers (N=319). In Study 2, the meaning that a separate sample of service workers (N=146) ascribed to their work fully mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological well-being, after controlling for humanistic work beliefs. Overall, these results support and add to the range of positive mental health effects associated with transformational leadership and are suggestive of interventions that organizations can make to improve well-being of workers.

Exploring linkages among transformational leadership, workplace spirituality and well-being in health care workers

Considerable data have accumulated showing positive relationships between leadership and well-being, and spirituality and well-being, but few have explored relationships among all three phenomena. In the current study, multilevel modeling was used to analyze survey data from a sample of 178 health care workers and test a proposed mediation model. As hypothesized, regression and mediation analyses revealed the effects of transformational leadership on measures of employees’ mental and spiritual well-being were fully mediated by workplace spirituality and, more specifically, respondents’ sense of community. Our results suggest that leaders influence individual well-being through their ability to enhance employees’ sense of community in the workplace.

Positive Leadership and Employee Well-Being

We report two studies examining the relationship between positive leadership behaviors and employee well-being. In the first, data from 454 nursing home employees showed that (a) a newly developed measure of positive leadership was distinct from transformational leadership and (b) positive leadership behaviors predicted context-specific and context-free well-being after controlling for transformational and abusive leadership. In the second study, data from a daily diary study (N = 26) showed that (a) positive leadership predicted positive, but not negative, employee affect and (b) positive leadership interacted with transformational leadership to predict employees positive affect.

Making Sense of Workplace Spirituality: Towards a New Methodology

The study of workplace spirituality is a relatively new area in the field of organizational theory. Although interest in the topic has grown significantly over the last 10 years, many of the traditional research methods are not well suited to study workplace spirituality at the organizational level. We propose that sensemaking offers a useful heuristic for understanding the process of institutionalizing workplace spirituality, as well as a way to study how and why workplace spirituality initiatives are wholly accepted by some individuals and resisted by others.

Taking the bad with the good: The buffering effect of positive social exchanges on aggression in care worker–resident relationships.

Objective: The current study investigated the buffering effect of positive social exchanges at work on the way workplace aggression and violence, both verbal and physical, affect individual well-being and commitment to the organization. Method: We collected survey responses from staff working in long-term care facilities (N = 723) about their experiences with residents and their outlook on their health and commitment to their workplaces. Results: Using multilevel modeling, we found a significant interaction effect of positive social exchanges with residents on resident-instigated aggression and violence in explaining the levels of employee well-being and commitment. Simple slopes analyses suggested that in staff who experience more positive social exchanges the negative effects of aggression and violence on individual well-being and commitment were dampened compared with staff who experienced less positive social exchanges. Conclusions: Because mistreatment behaviors operate in a wider context of concurrent social behaviors, examining experiences of aggression and violence without considering positive social exchanges can result in a truncated and misleading body of research findings. Furthermore, based on our findings, we recommend that employers should focus not only on eliminating aggressive and violent incidents at work but also on providing opportunities for care workers to develop high-quality relationships with their residents.