Organisational Leadership: How Much Does It Matter?

Getinet Haile

No 15554, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the influence of leadership on organisational performance and worker wellbeing using data from the 2004 and 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). Our most conservative estimates from fixed effects regressions on a panel of organisations reveal that virtuous leadership is significantly and positively linked to an upbeat assessment of organisational performance, and an increase in worker wellbeing. Specifically, the estimates reveal that an increase in leadership quality by one standard deviation increases organisational performance and worker job satisfaction by 0.27 and 0.73 standard deviations, respectively, while it leads to a fall in worker job anxiety by 0.13 standard deviations. The results support the hypothesis that good leadership is vital for the success of business including worker wellbeing, which organisational policy makers ought to heed. There is a dearth of evidence on organisational leadership as an institution and its influence on organisational outcomes, which this paper aims to address.

Keywords: organisational performance; worker wellbeing; linked data; leadership; Britain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 J28 J5 L2 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2023, 61 (3), 653 - 673

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15554.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Organizational leadership: How much does it matter? (2023)
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:iza:izadps:dp15554

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().