Does Self-Care Make You a Better Leader? A Multisource Study Linking Leader Self-Care to Health-Oriented Leadership, Employee Self-Care, and Health

Katharina Klug, Jörg Felfe and Annika Krick
Additional contact information
Katharina Klug: Faculty of Business Studies and Economics, University of Bremen, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Jörg Felfe: Department of Work, Organizational and Business Psychology, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, 22043 Hamburg, Germany
Annika Krick: Department of Work, Organizational and Business Psychology, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, 22043 Hamburg, Germany

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: Leadership plays an important role in employee well-being. In light of a growing research interest in leaders’ resources as determinants of healthy leadership, it is not yet clear how leaders’ behavior regarding their own health (self-care) may trickle down to employees. Drawing on Conservation of Resources Theory and the model of Health-Oriented Leadership, this study tests two mechanisms through which employees may benefit from self-caring leaders: (a) through staff care, that is, concern for their employees’ health (improved leadership hypothesis); and (b) through a direct relationship between leaders’ and employees’ self-care (role-modeling hypothesis). In turn, both staff care and employee self-care would relate positively to employee health. Multilevel path models based on a sample of N = 46 supervisors and 437 employees revealed that leader self-care was positively related to leader-rated staff care at Level 2, which was positively related to employee-rated staff care at Level 1. In turn, employee-rated staff care was positively related to employee health. The findings support the improved leadership hypothesis and underline the importance of leader self-care as a determinant of healthy leadership.

Keywords: health-oriented leadership; self-care; employee health; leader well-being; leadership; multilevel analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/11/6733/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/11/6733/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:11:p:6733-:d:829093

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().