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Leadership Behaviors and Subordinate Resilience

August 31, 2005 

"In recent years, a number of researchers in both psychology and organizational behavior have become interested in examining positive aspects of people and organizations (Luthans, Luthans, Hodgetts, & Luthans, 2001; Seligman & Scikszentmihalyi, 2000; Wright, 2003).  These researchers contend that research and application in both fields has focused too much on understanding negative phenomena while under-researching the positive aspects of organizational life.

Research on coping (a related area) offers additional insights on the factors influencing resilience.  In contrast to the resilience literature, the coping literature has focused largely on adult populations.  Similar to the resilience literature, the coping literature has focused on the individual and the situational factors influencing effective coping and the findings are consistent with those demonstrated for resilience (e.g., personality factors such as optimism, (Hewitt & Flett, 1996: 415-416) and situational factors such as social support (Pierce, Sarason & Sarason, 1996)).

While empirical research directly linking resilience and leadership could not be found, there are a number of authors who have theorized a link between leadership and resilience.  For example, Luthans and Avolio (2003: 256) note that developing the capacity for resilience is a vital component of authentic leadership development.  Some indirect support for the notion that leadership may be associated with subordinate resilience can be gleaned from the literature on leadership and subordinate reactions to stress.

The participants were 150 part-time Master's of Business Administration (MBA) students at a medium-sized midwestern university.  The mean age of participants was 30 years old.  Eighty-six (58%) of the participants were male, 63 (42%) were female.  One hundred thirty (88%) respondents were Caucasian; 17 (11%) classified themselves as a racial/ethnic minority.

Over a period of one year, a questionnaire was administered to students in all six sections of an MBA leadership Skills course, two sections of a required MBA Organizational course, and one Human Resource Management elective course.  Participation was completely voluntary an anonymous.  The questionnaire required approximately twenty minutes to complete two open-ended questions.  The first open-ended question was: 'Think of a time in the last two years when you experienced a difficult or challenging situation at work.'  After completing the challenging situation description, participants were asked to turn the page and respond to an open-ended question which read 'What helped you to deal with this situation?'  The remaining questionnaire skills measured resilience, optimism, and leader behaviors.

Due to the lack of an existing measure of outcome-oriented resilience, a measure was constructed to correspond very closely to the outcome-oriented conceptualizations of resilience an adaptive-coping described earlier in this paper.  Scheier and Carver's (1985) Life Orientation Test (LOT) contains four optimistic and four pessimistic statements based on a five-point Likert response measured optimism.  Bass and Avolio's (2000) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ 5x-Short) was used to measure Leadership Behaviors.

We hypothesized that the five Transformational Leadership dimensions and contingent Reward would be positively associated with Resilience before and after controlling for optimism.  All six of the hypothesized leadership behaviors were positively correlated with resilience.

As was hypothesized, the two transactional leadership dimensions (management-by-Exception active and Management-by-Exception Passive) and the Laissez-Faire leadership dimension were not significantly positively associated with subordinate resilience, before or after controlling for employee optimism.

Out of the 150 respondents, 34 (23%) indicated that their leader helped them deal with their challenging situation.  These responses were then transformed into a dichotomous variable in which 0 = 'did not mention leader' and 1 = 'mentioned leader.'  Mentioning the leader was positively correlated with resilience both before and after controlling for optimism.

Overall, the results of this study suggest that subordinate resilience may be impacted by leader behaviors and that there may be a variety of leadership behaviors that positively impact subordinate resilience.

This study utilized part-time MBA students as participants.  The age distribution was wide (ages ranged from 20 to 51 with an average age of 30) and the gender distribution was relatively even (58% male and 42% female).  This age and gender diversity should contribute positively to the generalizability of the results as should the fact that 11% of the participants were a racial minority.  However, it is certainly possible that MBAs may have different expectations of their leaders than other employees.  If so, then the results of this study may over-estimate the importance of these specific leader behaviors to subordinate resilience.

Additionally, because this study utilized self-reported resilience and optimism, this may have resulted in some level of socially desirable responding in that participants may have been motivated to portray their resilience (and optimism) in the most positive light possible.  Furthermore, because participants generated their own challenging situations it was not possible for us to control the actual severity of the challenges that were chosen.

The issue of leadership and subordinate resilience appears to be worthy of additional study.  The rate of change in organizations and the demands faced by employees do to appear to be slowing down (Harland, Harrison, Jones & Reiter, Palmon, 2005, p. 2-14)."

Reference:  Harland, L.; Harrison, W.; Jones, J.R.; and Reiter-Palmon, R. (2005).  Leadership behaviors and subordinate resilience.  The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 2005, vol. 11, no.2.

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Created: 2007-08-28, Updated: 2009-02-17