Many employees crave supportive leadership, professor's study finds

When anxious employees are paired with a leader who does not care, they experience low levels of trust and high levels of stress. This is because they desperately want support, but they are matched with the one type of leader who is most incapable of providing it.

Those are among the findings of a new study coauthored by Guohong Helen Han, YSU associate professor of Management, that appears in Human Relations, a top tier journal in the field of management.

Han, who earned a doctorate in Human Resources Management from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and completed her certified Senior Professional in Human Resources in 2016, conducted the study over five years, funded by a University Research Council Grant from YSU.

Impetus for the study
“Leadership is basically an interpersonal process,” she said, “However, a great deal of leadership research has focused on studying the role of personality in leaders alone. Even studies that investigate the leader-follower dynamics can over-emphasize one side of leader-follower relationship. Therefore it is very necessary for us to study not only the leader-follower dynamics, but also whether or not there is an interactive relationship between leader-follower. And if so, what kinds of emotional and behavioral consequences this is going to lead to.”

Personalities
“According to attachment theory, the interpersonal styles of how individuals interact with one another typically fall into three categories. One is secure attachment, which means that we always have a secure base for support. The other two categories are anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. Anxious attachment means that people have relatively low self-worth, and desperately seek emotional support. On the contrary, individuals with avoidant attachment do not seek support, nor do they care whether they are supported.”

Findings
“There are interesting interaction effects, which means if you pair anxious attachment-type followers with avoidance-type leaders, those people will suffer the most. This means that they will be more likely to become stressed out and will contribute less. The biggest finding of the study is that most followers don’t need as much support, but anxious-types need to be paired with strong leaders who can provide emotional and work support.”

So what?
“The study really showcases the importance of supportive leadership. Although the majority of followers do not need constant reassurance from the leaders, a great deal of them do.”

Han worked on the study with Peter Harms, assistant professor of Management at the University of Alabama, and Yuntao Bai, an associate professor at Xiamen University in China.

Story by Andrew Zuhosky