Enhancing Employee Performance: Positive Leadership And Psychological Capital (essay).

The following assessment aims to examine how well you understand the relationship between authentic leadership, effective Leader-Member Exchange and management support and the psychological capital of employees of different employee groups. It continues the development of Cultural Competence Learning Outcome and Graduate Attribute by facilitating students’ increased knowledge and awareness about how authentic leadership, effective Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and management support interact on employees outcomes.    

Analyse the leadership and/or employee performance (such as their engagement, turnover, commitment, wellbeing) at your workplace and compare it with the positive leadership and Psychological Capital literature.  How similar or different is your workplace from what is potentially possible as per recent research studies? Please consider some different types of employees (such as professionals versus administrative employees, emotional labour, blue collar versus white collar employees, different generational cohorts, and/or different ethnicities). Use the positive leadership and/or Psychological Capital literature to suggest how to move your workplace towards being more effective?

Role of Leadership in Employee Performance

This essay includes a detailed analysis revolving leadership and employee performance in the workplace. The discussion is aligned to positive leadership as well as psychological capital literature. Role of leadership in employee performance is crucial as both are positively influenced by each other. It is certain that in a competitive business environment, organizations tend to depend upon their leadership to facilitate the change and innovation needed to gain competitive advantages. Leaders play a great role in motivating employees so that the employees perform their duties and responsibility. Such leadership effort always lead to positive organizational outcome. However, leadership may remain trivial despite its potential, when employees lack motivation due to internal organizational factors such as limited pay, inflexible work culture, and inappropriate human resource practices. This fact often spark a debate on whether a good leadership is the sole requirement for enhancing employee and organizational performance. Thus, this essay particularly analyses role of leadership in employee performance considering sub-associated factors such as blue colour versus white colour employees, emotional labour, etc. This essay also derives a solution from positive leadership literature with respect to developing an effective workplace. Each paragraph is presented with a topic sentence which is aligned with leadership and employee performance.

Leadership styles play a great role in enhancing employee performance in the organization.  Chen et al., (2014) performed a study and found that the success of a business or an organization is mostly reliant on leaders’ ability to optimize human resources. The author of this study has mentioned that an effective leader particularly understands the significance of employees in accomplishing goals as well as motivating employees is of paramount importance in achieving these goals. On the other side, Carter et al., (2013) performed a study and agreed to the fact that effective organization need effective leadership and hence business performance may hamper in direct proportion to the negligence of this field. The author of this study has also mentioned the fact that leadership is probably the most investigated organizational variable that has a potential influence on employee performance. Nonetheless, Anitha (2014) argued that role of leadership in general in enhancing employee performance provides a superficial idea while a specified leadership aligned with employee well-being is more effective in positively influencing employee performance. Kelloway et al., (2013) performed a study on the impact of positive leadership on employee well-being and arguably stated that the fact that when making efforts for enhancing employee performance, an workplace should adopt positive leadership as unlike other leadership, positive leadership seek to enhance positive emptions empowerment as well as engagement felt by employees.

Sub-Associated Factors

Senior leadership impacts engagement through different levers. Taking the impact of senior leadership on employee engagement in account, Roche, Haar & Luthans (2014) commented that it appears inappropriate that the concept of senior leadership do not usually feature the top drivers of employee engagement in organization. Robertson, Jansen Birch and Cooper (2012) argued that such consequence is not surprising as people often considers the factors that influence them and consider them under their control. On the other side, Newman et al., (2014) mentioned that senior leadership with top most effectiveness does not fit such criteria. Particularly, in driving engagement in the highly populated lower range within the setting, senior leaders are not necessarily visible. In addition, they are considered to be barred from the operational side of organization. On the other side, Wong and Laschinger (2013) commented that it could be difficult to deliver employees with the exposure to senior leaders or revise an organization’s reward strategy to emphasize innovation with the leadership buy in. Nonetheless, it is worth stating that effective and long-term implementation of such initiatives may require visible investment as well a commitment from the senior leaders. Considering this support, it is still visible that stated practices often become embedded in the culture of organization; thereby, businesses have no significant options but to focus on leadership behaviour.

Comprised of elements including perceived inclusion, social networks, intimacy as well as participation in the development of others, the benefits of positive leadership to completely wellbeing of employees could be numerous in nature. In this context, Avey et al., (2011) commented that positive leadership could help to describe job satisfaction among the individuals who are not or may not be goals oriented in nature. Thus, low achievement oriented workers could be more likely to observe satisfaction from job factors such as supportiveness of co-workers as well as supervisors. In this context, Gruman and Saks (2011) commented that greater attention is required to influence leadership on some emotional constructs and on motivational states. Thereby, Bedarkar and Pandita (2014) argued that significant focus on such variable could allow business to effectively understand the complex manner in which leadership can be associated with more ultimate tangible outcome of performance. When it comes to gaining positive outcome or creating a link between employee performance and leadership. Soane (2014) mentioned that transformational as well as authentic behaviours can be grouped together whose central aims are to enhance the occurrence positive emptions experienced by the employees.  The authors of this study has also mentioned the fact that impact of empowering leadership on work engagement are usually by cognitive demands. However, in response to this statement, Carasco-Saul, Kim and Kim (2015) argued that leaders can create an environment that particularly enhances employee engagement by given a mediating factor.

Impact of Senior Leadership on Employee Engagement

Transactional leadership remains as an exchange process between the follower and the leader, which means transactional leadership style identifies particularly needs and desires of employees.  Dumdum, Lowe and Avolio (2013) commented that when it comes to loyalty and productivity, a satisfied employee may not be the best employee; conversely, it is considered as an example who is attached to the organization emotionally and has the passion for organizational activities. Such individual is committed towards its values and he goes beyond the additional path of the fundamental area. In this context, Clarke (2013) commented that leadership is fundamentally significant as it could affect the situation of the workplace. The author has pointed out the fact that leadership plays a great role in influencing the ranges of employee engagement. According to the authors, goal clarity and direction are identified as the factors that can strongly influence employees’ level of engagement. Besides the type of leadership styles and approaches, Strom, Sears and Kelly (2014) in the context of leadership and employment engagement, mentioned that most of the drivers of employee engagement are related to the behaviour of leaders. So, the attitude and actions of leaders in necessary levels can influence employee engagement.  The author of this study has also stated the fact that the ability of senior leadership in leading the organization towards a right direction as well as openly communicate the state of business to some interpersonal factors like treating employee with respect and recognizing the success could bring in considerable increase of employee engagement in the business.

Job performance of an employee increase with grater job satisfaction as well as job commitment and the most significant the function of any business is to maximize employees’ job performance thereby, it could compete in a highly competitive atmosphere. It was found that most the studies and theories are found which are found to ascertain a connection among the styles of leadership as well as work performance. Strom et al., (2014) mentioned that leaders put all their effort to provide full encouragement and support to their employees. Transformational leaders with larger individual thoughts can lead to positive outcome.  The authors of the above study has mentioned that existing studies have developed transformational leadership techniques is inter-related with employee job’s satisfaction and productivity. Therefore, it is worth stating that transactional leadership style has been less effective. Kelloway et al., (2013) commented that leadership style has his own influence and outcome with respect to employee performance. On the basis of this fact it can also be mentioned that the role of leadership can vary with the style and kinds but they are under different working conditions.  However, when the styles of leadership are specified with its characteristics and influences on organization or employee performance, transformational leadership style is capable of communicating sense of responsibility, task and intellectual inspiration.

Benefits of Positive Leadership

Employee turnover has been always a great concern issues faced by businesses irrespective of its regions, size and structure. Demirtas and Akdogan (2015) commented that employee turnover as a serious challenge particularly in the field of human resource management. Bedarkar and Pandita (2014) performed a study and found the relationship between leadership behaviour, satisfaction with leaders as well as voluntary turnover and found that there is a significant negative association between transformational leadership behaviour as well as voluntary organizational turnover intention.  Conversely, Carasco-Saul, Kim and Kim (2015) performed a study on exploring the relationship between leadership behaviour of employees and employee turnover. Findings of the study has revealed the fact that there is a weak correlation between leadership behaviour and employee turnover. It was found that employee turnover intention has received a considerable importance in the industrial as well as organizational psychology. Robertson, Jansen Birch and Cooper (2012) commented that the idea of organizational commitment has lately evolved in management as well as derives significant response in reviewing the workplace behaviour and attitudes. Hence, it is worth stating that organizational commitment includes employees’ organizational loyalty, eager to be a part of business and intended to do the best for the organization. However, above author has mentioned that turnover could be mainly the outcome of a negative relationship between the leaders and managers in the workplace and their followers. Transformational leadership and turnover intentions are considered as two different fields of study until recently. However, these two separate concepts have become a widespread and relied upon the assumptions that employees are most likely to be influenced by leadership behaviour of their immediate supervisors.

On the basis of the above discussion and the findings of the previous studies, it is worth stating that it is highly necessary to state that leaders play a great role in organization and their behaviour has a significant influence on the work behaviour, performance and well-being of their employees.  Nonetheless, existing studies on leadership have greatly neglected the facts on employee health and welling in favour of performance despite the relationship between well-being and performance remains at the best level. When considered in leadership studies, employee well-being has either been treated as the secondary outcome or as the mediator that helps to discuss leadership performance relationship. In addition to this, existing studies are not able to provide a specific or certain impact of leadership on employees. Studies have only demonstrated how leaders with their individual leadership style can enhance the level of employee engagement and reduce employee turnover by motivating employees and creating communication between the parties.

Association between Transactional Leadership and Employee Engagement

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it can be mentioned that there is no denying that employee performance can be influenced by leadership style. This means a leader with his/her managerial skills and approach can influence employees; so that employees perform their roles and responsibilities accordingly. However, when it comes to leadership, one has to consider the fact that there are certain practices that a leader or leadership style should consider. For example, in order to engage employees in workplace, leader has to establish a suitable healthy and open communication, through which employees can easily come and discuss their individual or workplace issues., So, once the issues are highlighted and found through communication, human resource or the management can take action to address the same. Here, communication plays the role of speeding up the process. When there is way of communication between leader and employee, employees can share their concerns instead of reflecting their prior existence in the turnover data.

References:

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Bedarkar, M., & Pandita, D. (2014). A study on the drivers of employee engagement impacting employee performance. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 133, 106-115.

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