Is avoidant leadership a root cause of subordinate stress? Longitudinal relationships between laissez-faire leadership and role ambiguity

By A. Skogstad, Jørn Hetland, Lars Glasø, Staale Einarsen. 2014

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Within a stressor-strain framework, the aim of this study is to examine the influence of perceived laissez-faire leadership – a type of leadership characterized by the superiors' avoidance and inaction when subordinates are experiencing a situational need for leadership – on stress in the form of experiences of role ambiguity. This was tested within a prospective 3-wave research design with time lags of 2 and 3 years respectively. A combination of 2 constructive types of leadership, initiating structure and showing consideration, was included as a control. In a sample of 1771 employees drawn from the Norwegian working population, structural equation modelling supported the hypothesis that perceived laissez-faire leadership would be positively related to experiencing role ambiguity at 3 consecutive measurement points. The findings did not support a potential reciprocal relationship between the two across time. Initiation of structure and Consideration were not related to role ambiguity, providing strong evidence of the importance of laissez-faire leadership within a stressor-strain framework. Demonstrating that laissez-faire leadership is a root source of subordinate role ambiguity underlines the importance of superiors perceiving situations and circumstances where subordinates experience a need for leadership and, accordingly, approaching this need instead of avoiding it.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88ee769ad01b8a438278c898ef3932877e519c00

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In General Health Professions

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

Main and interactive effects of weekly transformational and laissez‐faire leadership on followers’ trust in the leader and leader effectiveness (2019, background): “First, they contribute to research on laissez-faire leadership, which is relatively scarce compared to research on transformational leadership (Skogstad et al., 2014).”
Effects of customer incivility on frontline employees and the moderating role of supervisor leadership style (2020, methodology): “Laissez-faire supervisors remain less prone to provide FLEs with clear guidance on how to perform their role tasks (by themselves or following FLEs’ request), especially when dealing with customers with unreasonable demands (Bass & Bass, 2008; Skogstad et al., 2014).”