Relationship Between Authentic Leadership, Leader-Member Exchange And Employees’ Psychological Capital

The relationship between authentic leadership, Leader-Member Exchange and employees’ Psychological Capital (PsyCap)

Psychological Capital (PsyCap) and authentic leadership had been found to be interrelated. Both the factors aim in facilitating the creativity of employees. According to a study carried out by Gu, Tang and Jiang, (2015), a sample of 828 working people was considered. It was found that among these people the authentic leadership was positively related to the followers’ development regarding PsyCap. It was found that authentic leadership had a specific impact in the present group-level PsyCap of the employees. A substantial relationship has been found between follower PsyCap and authentic leadership (Wang, Sui and Luthans 2014). Numerous effective leaders have enables their present followers to contribute to the success of a specific organization. Some researchers argue that various authentic leaders present in an organization produce a huge number of follower self regulation and self awareness. This results in follower development and outcomes in a positive manner.

This assignment discusses regarding the relationship between authentic leadership, leader member exchange and employees’ psychology capital, it also reviews the literature that describe the ways by which the psychological capital of the different types of employees.

The relationship between authentic leadership, Leader-Member Exchange and employees’ Psychological Capital (PsyCap)

Relation between PsyCap and authentic leadership has been described by numerous researchers in the studies that they have carried out. According to some studies authentic leadership plays a very important role in such an extent that the followers feel empowered. It has been proposed in a study that the level of authenticity of a leader is directly related to exemplary behavior (Hirst, Walumbwa and Aryee 2016). Till date, there has been no research where the relation between fellowship dimensions and PsyCap has been explored. It has been found that employees who work in a better place, a positive working environment and a positive climate had high levels of PsyCap. It was also found that authentic leadership had a positive organizational climate compared to the ones who did not have authentic leadership. As per Gill and Caza, (2018) high levels of PsyCap have proved to be a reason for which employee creativity is increased. This factor a result becomes the reason for exemplary followership. The dimension of PsyCap can be argued to be very important for the critical thinking of the followers.

PsyCap has a positive relation with the attitude of employees. After a Meta analysis that has been carried out on PsyCap it has been a found that it is positively related to employee attitudes that are desirable and is negatively related to various undesirable employee attitudes. If an employee considers that a person who has a high level of PsyCap expects good things to happen at his workplace, they need to demonstrate a belief regarding the fact that they are capable of creating their own success. Along with this they should also be able to deal constructively with various setbacks. This fact must be logically deduced that the employees are having a very positive attitude (Hoch, Bommer and Dulebohn 2018). In turn, they are likely to involve themselves in their personal works as well as stay enthusiastic regarding their tasks.

Review the literature that explains how to build the psychological capital of some different types of employees

Some researchers have observed a very positive relation between work engagement, optimism, self efficacy and the PsyCap that the employees have. Some followerships suggest that the followers that actively engage would take the initiative and they immerse themselves in specific jobs that have been allocated to them. Exemplary followership might be linked to the fact that someone gets absorbed in their work which has been defined in the construct of work engagement (Hsieh and Wang 2015). It can be conceptually argued that some exemplary followers that are very actively engaged as well as demonstrate their critical thinking would experience high levels of work engagement.

Review the literature that explains how to build the psychological capital of some of the different types of employees

Achieving a sustainable competitive advantage nowadays especially in the environment of high competition needs to have a context specific, hard to imitate and renewable resources. These resources are set in such as way that they are unique to the organization and no other company is able to copy it by any means. Some researchers found out that this can be accomplished with the help of investing, managing physiological capital and developing. As a result investigating regarding the fact that what an organization can do for developing as well as managing the physiological capital of an employee, the authors need to propose few mechanisms (Bedi, Alpaslan and Green 2016). These mechanisms include the development of authentic leadership and psychological capital training interventions. Unlike the personal traits that are fixed and some other established positive constructs that are similar to traits are connected to the outcome of the performance. Physiological capital is similar to state which means they are malleable and open to changes (Niu, Yuan and Qian 2018). This can be supported by the psychology literature where research on the topic of hope, optimism, efficacy and resilience suggests that PsyCap are the ones that develop facts.

There are various practices that are carried out in order to improve the PsyCap of followers. PsyCap can be developed by a very high focused and brief micro intervention on the basis of group discussions that are designed in order to impact the levels of hope in the participants, the level of resilience, efficacy, optimism, individually and the overall level of the employees’ PsyCap. According to Schriesheim and Liu (2018), these practices are carried out parallel with most of the training regarding leadership. These trainings are very short in duration. This short duration of the training avoids any sort of disruption in the processes regarding the ways they work. The physiological capital intervention that has been proposed as well as tested by various researchers has been demonstrated in order to increase the actual level of psychological capital individually. Utility analysis that has been used in human resource management has demonstrated that this sort of increase had a high return on the amount of investment that has been done.

Replicating the previous research, some other crucial study has ensured that PsyCap can be developed with the help of implementation of face to face training having very short intervals. These practices lead to an improvement in the significant performance of various employees. PsyCap training has also been an important subject as well as a subject of interest among various researchers in a specific field of organizational behavior. To be more specific interventions of web based training had been proposed as an operation of PCI model. This particular model minimizes time as well as costs that are connected to the implementation of the process.

In order to sum up the relevant research in the particular field of organizational behavior that is positive in nature confirms that notion that the psychological capital could be developed with the help of short interventions of training which minimize disruption in the work process and assures a significant improvement in the performance of employees. After the idea of PsyCap has been developed the questions arose that weather the leads impacted the psychological capital of the followers’. Explaining this it was found that a positive relationship between leaders and their followers increases the Psychological capital of both the parties. After investing various antecedents belonging to psychological capital has been demonstrated that authentic leadership is one of the strongest predators of PsyCap (Lin, Ma and Zhang 2018). These factors are followed by various characteristics provided to employees in a job.

Emotions significantly impact the performance of employees

An employee has the chances of getting critically effected by their individual behavior in the workplace. The emotions of the employees as well as the overall treatment provided to them create a significant impact on the performance of the job, skills of decision making, turnover and leadership (Rego, Owens and Leal 2017). The feelings of employees and the ways they express them create an impact on the performance of the employees, this as a result create an impact on the overall performance of the organization. If the employee performs well, the organization would be able to perform better as well but if the emotions of an employee affect his performance in any way, the organization would be at loss, it would not be able to meet its objectives and will run behind its competitors.

Emotions influence the creativity, decision making, interpersonal relations and many more factors of an employee. If a person is surrounded with people who are very cooperative and where he can express his feelings freely, the employee can perform without any obstacle and would feel to ask any queries regarding any down that has been bothering him. After carrying out various researches on this topic it has been found out that the emotions in the workplace are considered important in relation to the employees’ job satisfaction as well as well being. Anger usually leads to aggressions towards the colleagues and sadness results in dissatisfaction in the job.

The job performance of employees is affected in various ways like turnover, earnings, awards, performance, job attendance as well as subjective performance. Impact of various workplace education programs also has the chance to effect employees’ job performance. In any professional field, some technical knowledge is required in order to support the employees in that job. This knowledge helps the employees to enhance their performance. In the business where manufacturing is carried out, workplace education creates a great impact on earning of the employees and the betterment of the company (Schriesheim and Liu 2018).

An organization which does not include workplace education has high chances of employee turnover. Employee turnover is directly proportional to the emotions of the employees. Suppose an employee is in a workplace environment where he is not treated well and is not allowed to express freely, he would not be happy with his job and hence the turnover rate increases. Most of the organizations think the employees need them more, but actually the companies need the employees more in order to run their business but the lack of this realization makes the organization treat in a wrong manner. This as a result increases the rate of employee turnover in the organization.

The emotions of employees affect the performances of employees directly.

Some ways by which these factors affect the performance and reasons behind them are mentioned below:

In an organization, employees need to face various sorts of emotions. These emotions might be happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety and may more. Suppose in an organization the employees are provided a very comfortable environment where people belonging to high authorities behave in a proper manner with the employees and provide everyone with equal respect, in this sort of environment the employees would be happy to work. such an environment makes employees feel good about themselves as well as their job and keeps them motivated to work with dedication, loyalty and honestly (Lin, Ma and Zhang 2018). These circumstances would produce the emotion of happiness in the employees and help them in improving their performance. The good emotion helps the employees to express their feelings even more and keep their mind stable without any grudge which helps them to work efficiently. According to various studies it has been found that the employees who are treated equally, provided with equal benefits and respected equally help the company to grow more and do better in their overall performance.

If the employees are not provided with a good working environment and they are not even treated well they seem to experience negative emotions like anger, grudge and many more. The negative emotions in employees fill their minds with negative thoughts and shift their concentration from their work. Suppose employees in a company are treated differently on the basis of their religion, cast, sex, creed, race and many more, they would feel bad and this would affect their performance. In most of the cases team leaders or people belonging to high authorities do partiality with employees whom they like or know them personally, this seems to be unfair to other employees and effects their performance as well. The dissatisfaction of employees would lead in their poor performance as a result it would worsen the overall performance of the organization.

In most of the cases, the professionals belonging to high authorities point out the faults of employees or abuse them in front of other employees; this creates an emotion of anger and sadness in the employees (Schriesheim and Liu 2018). This makes them feel embarrassed and sad regarding themselves. They get de-motivated as well as a result this creates a negative impact on the performance of the employees as well as the company.

Conclusion

From the above report it can be concluded that PsyCap and authentic leadership both aim in facilitating the creativity of employees. Authentic leadership has a specific impact in the present group-level PsyCap of the employees. A specific relationship has been found between follower PsyCap and authentic leadership. Various authentic leaders present in an organization produce a huge number of follower self regulation and self awareness. The above report discusses in details regarding this relationship. It also presents some results of the studies that have been carried out by numerous researchers.

References

Bedi, A., Alpaslan, C.M. and Green, S., 2016. A meta-analytic review of ethical leadership outcomes and moderators. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(3), pp.517-536.

Gill, C. and Caza, A., 2018. An investigation of authentic leadership’s individual and group influences on follower responses. Journal of Management, 44(2), pp.530-554.

Gu, Q., Tang, T.L.P. and Jiang, W., 2015. Does moral leadership enhance employee creativity? Employee identification with leader and leader–member exchange (LMX) in the Chinese context. Journal of Business Ethics, 126(3), pp.513-529.

Hirst, G., Walumbwa, F., Aryee, S., Butarbutar, I. and Chen, C.J.H., 2016. A multi-level investigation of authentic leadership as an antecedent of helping behavior. Journal of Business Ethics, 139(3), pp.485-499.

Hoch, J.E., Bommer, W.H., Dulebohn, J.H. and Wu, D., 2018. Do ethical, authentic, and servant leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), pp.501-529.

Hsieh, C.C. and Wang, D.S., 2015. Does supervisor-perceived authentic leadership influence employee work engagement through employee-perceived authentic leadership and employee trust?. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 26(18), pp.2329-2348.

Lin, W., Ma, J., Zhang, Q., Li, J.C. and Jiang, F., 2018. How is benevolent leadership linked to employee creativity? The mediating role of leader–member exchange and the moderating role of power distance orientation. Journal of Business Ethics, 152(4), pp.1099-1115.

Niu, W., Yuan, Q., Qian, S. and Liu, Z., 2018. Authentic leadership and employee job behaviors: The mediating role of relational and organizational identification and the moderating role of LMX. Current Psychology, 37(4), pp.982-994.

Rego, A., Owens, B., Leal, S., Melo, A.I., e Cunha, M.P., Gonçalves, L. and Ribeiro, P., 2017. How leader humility helps teams to be humbler, psychologically stronger, and more effective: A moderated mediation model. The Leadership Quarterly, 28(5), pp.639-658.

Schriesheim, C.A. and Liu, Y., 2018. Distinguished Scholars Invited Essay: Becoming a Good Sport and a Better Performer: A Social Information Processing View of Authentic Leadership. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 25(2), pp.141-152.

Wang, H., Sui, Y., Luthans, F., Wang, D. and Wu, Y., 2014. Impact of authentic leadership on performance: Role of followers’ positive psychological capital and relational processes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(1), pp.5-21.