Leader Work Meaningfulness
LEADING WITH MEANING: HOW AND WHEN LEADER WORK
MEANINGFULNESS TRANSFERS TO FOLLOWERS
Leaders are managers of meaning. A fundamental leadership task is to infuse
employees’ work with meaningfulness and shape employees’ perception of work as positive
and significant. However, research has been rather silent on the role of leaders’ own work
meaningfulness for imbuing followers’ work with meaning. In particular, little is known
about whether, how, and when leaders’ experience of work meaningfulness might be
transferred to followers’ work meaningfulness.
In order to understand the influence of leader work meaningfulness in organizations, we
argue that leader work meaningfulness carries over to follower work meaningfulness through
visionary leadership behavior. Drawing from the self-concept based theory of leaders’
motivation (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993; Sosik, 1998), we expect that leaders who
perceive their own work as positive and significant are more likely to lead visionary, i.e.
communicate a positive, idealized, and inspirational image of the organization’s future. In
turn, when employees get a positive affirmation from their leaders that their work contributes
to achieving a desired future for the organization, this can be expected to enhance followers’
perception that their work is positive and significant, and hence their work meaningfulness,
which might eventually increase their level of goal achievement and organizational
citizenship behavior, while decrease their turnover intention.
Additionally, we expect that followers’ organizational tenure influences the effect of
visionary leadership on their work meaningfulness in such way that visionary leadership
matters most for employees with low organizational tenure. In line with research on
socialization processes that newcomers are particularly susceptible to social influence under
conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity and actively seek information (Miller & Jablin,
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Leader Work Meaningfulness
1991), we assume that the cues that people receive early in their organizational tenure might
carry greater weight in the creation of their overall work meaningfulness.
Referring to the relationship between leader work meaningfulness and visionary
leadership, we suppose that this linkage is reinforced by a leader’s propensity to lead him-/
herself through positive mental imagery. As an organization’s vision is an inspirational image
of the organization’s future which ideally consists of a vivid, mental image with image-based
words (Carton, Murphy, & Clark, 2014), leaders, who perceive their work as meaningful and
lead themselves through positive mental images, i.e. they imagine the successful performance
of the task before it is actually completed (Neck & Manz, 1992), might show more visionary
leadership behavior.
Methodology and Main Results
In order to test our hypotheses, we conducted two multilevel survey studies comprising
79 mid-level leaders and 446 employees (Study 1) and 204 top management leaders and 292
mid-level leaders (Study 2). The results of Study 1 revealed that work meaningfulness of
mid-level leaders conveys to followers through visionary leadership. Study 2 provided
evidence that this carry-over effect also applies from top management leaders to mid-level
leaders. In both studies, work meaningfulness was positively related to goal achievement and
organizational citizenship behavior, and was negatively related to turnover intentions of
organizational members. Furthermore, our research showed that the extent to which visionary
leadership translates into followers’ work meaningfulness may be stronger for organizational
members who have been in the organization relatively shortly. While we did not find a
significant interaction effect of visionary leadership and organizational tenure of mid-level
leaders in Study 2, we found that organizational tenure of employees acts as a boundary
condition which enhances the effect of mid-level visionary leadership on employees work
meaningfulness for those employees with low organizational tenure in Study 1. Additionally,
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the findings of Study 2 indicate that the relationship between leader work meaningfulness and
visionary leadership is reinforced by top management leaders’ positive mental imagery.
Theoretical Implications
We see three important contributions of our work to the literature. First, we introduce
the perspective and role of leader work meaningfulness to the extant literature on work
meaningfulness (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). While doing
so, we theoretically and empirically examined the linkage of leaders’ and followers’ work
meaningfulness at different hierarchical levels, and revealed visionary leadership as the
mechanisms through which work meaningfulness carries over from leaders to followers. Our
research points out that leaders – the meaning managers – might first of all manage their own
perception of work meaningfulness and lead themselves through positive mental images so
that their followers’ work meaningfulness is enhanced through their visionary behavior.
Second, we identified organizational tenure as a boundary condition which limits the
effectiveness of leaders’ visionary cues on followers. In the course of this, we provide
theoretical arguments and empirical support for the importance of timing for leaders’ social
influence on followers – a research direction which scholars had called for (Roe, 2008;
Sonnentag, 2012). In particular, we advance research on visionary leadership by adding
organizational tenure as a contingency of leaders’ visionary behavior on followers’ work
meaningfulness (van Knippenberg, Stam, & Day, 2014). Third, we contribute to research on
positive organizations (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003) by replicating and extending prior
research on behavioral outcomes of work meaningfulness, and showing how leaders across
the organization can help generating these outcomes. Across the two studies, we found that
work meaningfulness is positively related to goal achievement and organizational citizenship
behavior and negatively related to turnover intentions among leaders and employees.
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