Will they follow through? The impact of

Abstract

In recent years, the need for organizations to focus on not only performance, but also the well-being of employees has become apparent. According to Gallup (2022), globally $322 billion in loss is associated with turnover and/or productivity loss from burnout, and 75% of all employee medical costs came from preventable conditions. Considering the magnitude of well-being concerns, one area that has shown to play a large role in employee health processes is leadership, with several meta-analytic studies noting positive relationships between leadership styles and health outcomes (e.g., Montano et al., 2016). As such, the current study investigated the role of follower health-promoting leadership perceptions on employee subjective well-being judgements and work engagement. Health-promoting leadership is a health-specific leadership style that focuses on improving follower health by shaping the health-promoting nature of the work environment (Eriksson, 2011). These leaders seek to create a more health-promoting culture in the organization and encourage followers to participate in health-promoting programs. In doing this, leaders look to shape several areas of work including follower workload, value-fit perceptions, rewards, sense of control, sense of community, and perceptions of fairness. Considering the recent development of the construct, calls have been made to further understand the context in which health-promoting leadership is effective (Rudolph et al., 2020). One such ascribed personality trait that has a sizeable amount of theoretical grounding in leadership research is behavioral integrity. In terms of leadership, behavioral integrity is the perceptions held by followers of the alignment between a leader’s espoused values and actions (Simons, 1999). Central to the role of behavioral integrity is follower perceptions. As such, it does not inherently involve actual alignment between words and actions (Simons, 2002; Simons et al., 2022). In addition to behavioral integrity, one highly relevant contextual factor that may influence the effectiveness of health-promoting leadership is the role of teleworking. Recently, partly resulting from residual effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (Parker et al., 2021), a relatively large number of positions that were previously fully functioning in-person have moved to remote or hybrid formats. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this trend is happening across many industries, with certain industries (e.g., publishing or data processing) seeing more than half of their workforce functioning remotely (Pabilonia & Redmond, 2024). With the relevance of remote work on today’s workers, the current study decided to investigate how teleworking intensity, or the average portion of working hours spent teleworking per week, influence health-promoting leadership perception outcomes. Additionally, the potential three-way interaction between health-promoting leadership perceptions, behavioral integrity, and teleworking intensity was investigated. The current study collected data from 355 individuals recruited through Cloud Research’s Connect Platform (Hartman et al., 2023). Following data cleaning, a final sample of 310 participants was retained for data analysis. After providing informed consent, participants completed a survey consisting of demographic items, job-related items, and validated measures for all main study variables (besides telework which was measured as the average hours teleworked per week divided by the average hours worked per week multiplied by 100). Correlational, regression, and moderated regression analyses were completed to analyze the hypothesized relationships between study variables. Results provided support for the hypothesized direct effects of health-promoting leadership perceptions on follower work engagement and all components of subjective well-being (life satisfaction, positive affect, and absence of negative affect). Additionally, support was found for the moderating influence of behavioral integrity on the health-promoting leadership—negative affect relationship. No other significant two-way or three-way interactions were found. Results of this study provide further understanding of the relatively new health-promoting leadership variable, as well as establish the ability for health-promoting leadership to function in a telework environment. Theoretical and practical implications, study limitations, and areas of future research are discussed.