Health-Oriented Leadership and Employee Well-Being
Summary
Health-oriented leadership encompasses deliberate behaviours by managers aimed at promoting physical and psychological health among their teams. This approach integrates two complementary dimensions: staff care, where leaders actively monitor and support the health needs of employees, and self-care, where leaders model healthy behaviours and encourage employees to take responsibility for their own well-being. Grounded in resource theories, health-oriented leadership seeks to enhance job resources—such as autonomy, social support and positive feedback—while reducing job demands that contribute to stress and burnout. By fostering trusting relationships and a climate of mutual respect, health-oriented leaders not only protect against adverse outcomes like emotional exhaustion and presenteeism but also cultivate resilience, engagement and performance. Practical applications range from leadership training seminars that build health-promoting skills to feedback systems that guide leaders in refining workloads, communication and participation. The global salience of this approach is underscored by mounting evidence linking supportive leadership to lower rates of work-related illness, higher retention and sustained productivity across diverse sectors including healthcare, education and professional services.
Research from Nature Portfolio
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Health-Oriented Leadership and Employee Well-Being publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in health-oriented leadership and employee well-being across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Health-oriented leadership: A leadership style that proactively promotes and protects employee health through both follower-directed and self-directed behaviours.
Staff care: The health-specific actions taken by leaders to monitor, support and respond to the well-being needs of their team members.
Self-care: The health-promoting behaviours modelled and encouraged by leaders for themselves and their employees, encompassing stress management and healthy work habits.
Leader–member exchange (LMX): The quality of the dyadic relationship between a leader and an employee, characterised by trust, mutual respect and obligation.
References
- When and how health‐oriented leadership relates to employee well‐being—The role of expectations, self‐care, and LMX. Journal of Applied Social Psychology (2021).
- The effectiveness of health-oriented leadership interventions for the improvement of mental health of employees in the health care sector: a systematic review. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health (2020).
- Caring for Oneself or for Others? How Consistent and Inconsistent Profiles of Health-Oriented Leadership Are Related to Follower Strain and Health. Frontiers in Psychology (2019).
- Enhancing Resources at the Workplace with Health-Promoting Leadership. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2017).
- Developing Sustainable Workplaces with Leadership: Feedback about Organizational Working Conditions to Support Leaders in Health-Promoting Behavior. Sustainability (2017).
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