ROLE OF LEADERSHIP STYLES IN MANAGING EMPLOYEE WELLBEING WITH THE MEDIATING ROLE OF CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The wellbeing of the employees has become a fundamental issue of modern organizations that have to work in more complicated and challenging conditions. The role of leadership in the experience of employees at work cannot be overlooked, yet the processes that allow various leadership styles to impact employee wellbeing are not investigated to its full. To fill this gap, the current paper will discuss how leadership styles, transactional, transformational and charismatic can be used to manage employee wellbeing with special attention to the mediating role of conflict management.

This study will be guided by the theory of Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) and the theory of Social Exchange as it postulates that the leadership styles will also present itself as advantageous job resources and play a role in enabling the employees to handle the demands of the work environment particularly the interpersonal conflict. It adopted a quantitative research design and collected data through its focus on employees working in organization setting through a structured questionnaire. The evaluation of the measurement and structural model was performed with the partial least squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and it was determined to be reliable with a good test of hypothesis through bootstrapping processes.

The outcomes achieved suggest that the transactional, transformational and charismatic types of leadership play a significant positive role in conflict management. Conflict management on the other hand demonstrates good and considerable relationship with employee wellbeing. Besides this, the mediation analysis confirms that conflict management elucidates mediation among all the three styles of leadership and wellbeing of employees significantly. These results show that the leadership directly and indirectly influences the wellbeing of employees by encouraging positive conflict management behaviors.

The article contributes to the literature on leadership and wellbeing as it is empirically based on the idea that conflict management is a valuable explanatory variable that can explain the relationship between leadership styles and employee wellbeing. Practically, it can also be concluded that the findings also suggest the importance of enabling the growth of leadership qualities that would support healthy conflict management to enable the health of the employees and the sustainability of the organization.