Role Of Supervision And Leadership: Relationship Between Employee And Managers

Intent of the Journal Article

Discuss about the Role of Supervision and Leadership.

This article focuses on the relationship between employee and their managers in an organizational leadership and the way emotions associated with them affects their job satisfaction and overall mental health in a typical work environment (Mark and Smith, 2012). At first, it examines the direct effects of the managers and supervisors and their leadership behaviours which affect the expressed emotions, experienced emotions and the emotional control the employee’s experience (Weiss and Cropanzo, 1996). Then it explains that the leadership behaviours of managers can lessen the impact of employee’s emotional regulation in a positive way. For research, experience sampling methodology and within-person method is done to focus leadership behaviours and within-persons co-variations (Schaubroeck and Jones, 2000).

According to Bono et al. (2007), participants were selected from a wide variety of professions ranging from the case manager, lab technician, nurse, human resource among many. A total of 57 employees were selected from a health organization with an average of 41 years old and mixed races including Caucasian, Asian and African-American. Three types of research were carried out: experience sampling data, survey data, and a leadership behaviour survey. The first one was made by handing a handheld computer to the participants to record their job satisfaction, momentarily stress, and experiences over the course of two weeks. The second one was a paper survey which was general in nature, where they provided stress and job satisfaction data. The third one, leadership behaviour supervisors’ survey was done from an organization.

For leadership behaviors of supervisors’, measurement was done using 20-factor MLQ or Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire as it is a commonly used measure for measuring transformational leadership validity and reliability. Responses were recorded on a scale of 5. Job satisfaction was measured using the same 5 point scale and using Brayfield-Rothe items. They were questioned next on their interaction with peers if they were at work after the signaling off the PDA.  Experiences were recorded next by selecting three negative and three positive emotions. Positive ones include enthusiasm, happiness and optimism and negatives ones included irritation, anger, and anxiety. Stress was measured next by asking the participants that they were feeling stress and again noted on a scale of 5. The examiners addressed the hypotheses 1 and two by analyzing supervisor’s role in experiences of an employee to find the between interaction partner and affected experiences of the employees. The next examination undertaken was to test the theory of transformation leadership behaviors’ of supervisors in relation with employee relations across interactions between co-workers and customers. Besides the given method, the examiners also hypothesized a moderating effect for same the leadership.

Research Methods Used by the Authors

The study has been divided into different parts, and hypotheses are given for every situation. As stated by Nixon, Brukâ€ÂLee and Spector (2016), the first hypothesis tells that employees experience more positive emotions when interacting with co-workers and clients than with employers, and the reason is that employers monitor the behaviour, evaluate performance and oversee work of the employees which brings discomfort as they prefer more autonomy. Constant monitoring also brings about irritation, restraints emotional expressions and behaviour (Ryan and Deci, 2000). Since the negative interactions of the mood of employees were found to be about five times stronger than the effects of positive mood, therefore, any positive effect of a good mood is easily overshadowed by negative mood (George and Zhou, 2001).

The second hypothesis tells that there is a positive correlation between managers and leaders when the transformation leadership managers affect the employees, and the positive vibe lasts throughout the whole workday (Green, 2014). Transformational leadership among managers brings about happiness, enthusiasm and prevents triggering of anger, frustration or anxiety in employees (Sy et al., 2005).

As opined by Humphrey, Ashforth and Diefendorff (2015), the third hypothesis states, regulating emotions like faking positive emotions and hiding negative emotions is positively related to stress in individuals and negatively associated with individual job satisfaction. Emotional regulation is a process where employees chose to behave and show their expressions in a certain way as to conform to the environment of the workplace (Little, 2000). The article includes research from other studies which shows this phenomenon to be harmful to the employees as it means involves pretending which is not authentic. Suppressing emotions said to have the greater strain on cardiovascular, cognitive and physiological health (Beal et al., 2013).

The fourth hypothesis states that, when managers and leaders engage in transformational leadership, the more focused is a positive balance between job satisfaction and emotional control than when the focus on the leadership is less (Hackman and Johnson, 2013). When transformational leadership is stronger, the link between stress and emotional regulation is very less compared to when the transformation leadership is weaker. With this leadership, the employees felt more consistent and self-congruent with own values and interests. The study presents two theories of Goal Self-concordance and self-determination theory to show that employees at workplace experience feel which leads separation of self and depersonalization (Sheldon and Elliott, 1999). It says that transformational leaders are not only empathetic, but the managers who practice the leadership style also find the greater social support of their employees (Zapf, 2002).

Identify Arguments of the Article

According to Brief and Weiss (2002), many organizational kinds of literature speak in details about the leaders and managers’ mood with affecting emotions and moods, but there has been little research data to back it up. In contrast, this study proposed a research study for the same. The outcome of this study was that when the employees did interact with co-workers, customers, and clients, there was a rise in a positive mood, optimism, enthusiasm, and happiness than communicating with supervisors (Bersade, 2002). The same level of increase in mood was observed when the employees reported to their supervisors who practiced transformational leadership as this leadership acts as a buffer for the employee’s moods. By this study, it was also found out that, employees who regulate their emotions at work tend to have less job satisfaction even though the effects of it were short-lived (Lee and Allen, 2002). In comparison, the effects of stress were more long-lasting. There were some practical limitations too of this study. The examiners stated that they could not examine the subgroups of employees in a service, sample studies were taken only from one organization, most of the participants were populated by females, and therefore the same cannot be held true for men (Pugh, 2001).

References:

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