Meaningful Leadership and Employees’ Well-being: Process through Meaningful Work

Abstract

Based on the principle of intrinsic motivation of self-determination theory, the purpose of the present research was to unearth the effect of meaningful leadership on followers’ positive emotional well-being indirectly through meaningful work. The following 665 workers were recruited from varied organizations and surveyed 3 times over a period of one month. To test the current study’s hypotheses, we checked whether meaningful work explained meaningful leadership’s relationship with employees' positive emotional well-being in the form of intrinsic motivation. Structural equation modelling was applied interesting of a mediation model in Mplus. The results suggested that the employees who perceive their leaders’ behaviors as meaningful recognize their work more meaningful and ultimately have positive emotional well-being. Overall, the results of our study support and contribute to the positive organizational psychology literature, specifically empirically found that meaningful leadership contributes to the meaningful work of the followers and positive emotional well-being. Further, suggested measures for managers to improve the well-being of employees