The Role of Health-Promoting Leadership in Reinforcing Subordinates’ Meaningfulness in Life & Meaning in Stressful Events: A Cross-Cultural Study

The Research Project

Background

Transformational supervisors (i.e., those who inspire, give individualized consideration, intellectually stimulate, and idealize influence; Bass, 1985) promote subordinate health and well-being (Berger et al., 2023). Conversely, abusive supervisors create a toxic work environment that results in an unhealthy workforce (Gallegos et al., 2022). However, there is little research addressing the mechanism through which these supervisory leadership styles affect subordinate well-being (i.e., low anxiety and low turnover intention). This study, therefore, focuses on meaningfulness in life (MIL) and meaning in stressful events (MISE) as mechanisms through which leadership type will relate to anxiety and turnover intention. MIL and MISE reflect cognitive dispositions, which are, in part, similar to Leider’s (2015) notion of purpose, particularly as pertaining to a sense of action.

Summary of Relevant Literature

The topic of MIL took stage in psychology after Frankl (1963) began writing on the role of a person’s cognitive disposition to handle stressors—an area that played out quite notably for Frankl himself, when he was taken as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. His most prominent work was Man’s Search for Meaning. Many studies have since been done in the domain of clinical and social psychology, but few have examined the topic in relation to psychosocial work stressors and worker well-being. However, those studies have not always captured the essence of what it means to have MIL. As Frankl made clear, no one reappraises the most atrocious experiences as being valuable, but people can strengthen resilience through those experiences by choosing not to allow the events to define them and their choices. It is with this perspective in mind that we define MIL as an applied philosophy of living, and thus a cognitive disposition, that orients (or motivates) individuals to appraise and reframe events in a way that enables them to persevere through those events. Deviating slightly from Leider (2015), the idea behind MIL is not that any one goal or set of goals gives purpose, but rather it is a person’s way of identifying purpose despite an adverse event happening that helps mitigate or overcome the strains typically associated with noxious stimuli.

For about 20 years, there has been a resurgence of research on meaning in life, but that research has been mostly done in clinical psychology or social psychology research settings (e.g., Pulopulos & Kozusznik, 2018; Leider, 2015) and not so much in terms of occupational health. One recent study shows that MIL also plays a role in how well people manage work stressors in Brazil (Torres et al., 2022). Other studies have demonstrated that the MIL measure is cross-culturally invariant and that it moderates some work stressor – work outcome relationships in USA, Spain, and Germany (Glazer et al., in progress).

Since the creation of the Glazer MIL (GMIL) measure in 2008, another measure was created to examine cultural differences in people’s sensemaking of stressful events (Ji et al., 2022). Not so different from Pines’ (2004) assertion that Israeli nurses overcome stressors better than Dutch and Polish nurses do because Israelis face more existential threats on a daily basis, Ji et al. (2022) presented a cultural explanation for why Chinese students were better able to cope with adversity associated with COVID-19 than Euro-Canadians. They created a measure to assess the extent to which people find MISE. They claimed that people will often change responses to situations after changing their own expectations about those situations (Ji et al., 2022). Specifically, Ji and colleagues (2022) set out to study the role of culture on a person’s likelihood of engaging in meaning-making to noxious situations. They explained that people in China, compared to Euro-Canadians, are more likely to find value in adverse situations and adopt a positive reframing coping style. Adopting a positive reframing coping style was also associated with greater resilience and, thus, MISE is associated with more resilient coping amongst Chinese study participants. Drawing on findings on Americans and Japanese, respectively, they suggest that Euro-Canadians may emphasize influence and control over situations, whereas Chinese may adapt to the situation at hand by accepting and reframing it with expectation of benefit later (i.e., struggle now to enjoy later).

Clearly, it is not possible to expect that everyone has high MIL or find MISE. Moreover, it is not possible to mitigate all work-related stressors, including stopping an abusive supervisor, immediately. However, it is possible to reduce unnecessary stressors so that people high on MIL won’t leave a noxious work environment (Glazer & Viscone, 2023). Managers who create decent work environment, as is often the case with transformational leaders (Berger et al., 2023), will likely have workers who will find MISE and have high MIL, which will protect them when faced with acute stressors or necessary chronic stressors. In contrast, with low MIL and low levels of creating MISE, an abusive leader would likely intensify experiences of anxiety, compared to those with high MIL and high MISE.

Finally, there is ample evidence that leaders set the tone for creating decent work environments (e.g., Inceoglu et al., 2018). More specifically, transformational leaders (vs. laissez-faire leaders) create health promoting environments (Berger et al., 2023). However, to date no studies have examined MIL and MISE in relation to one another, both in relation to subordinate-experienced leadership styles, and either in cross-cultural research within the same countries. Thus, the proposed study examines leadership style in relation to MIL and MISE, the relationship between MIL and MISE, and the nomological net connecting leadership style with anxiety and turnover intention via MIL and MISE across eight countries.

Research Questions

(1) What does MIL mean to people across cultures? And, to what extent do the qualitative responses to the MIL question reflect the quantitative measurement score?

(2) Do people who have a high MIL tend to find MISE? (i.e., Do the measures of MIL and MISE address discrete aspects of meaning?)

(3) To what extent are MIL and MISE discrete constructs? Do these measures affect the stressor-strain (i.e., anxiety, physical health, turnover intention) relationship in the same (or different) ways across countries?

(4) What is the link between leadership style and both MIL and MISE? Do people who have transformational leaders (vs. abusive supervisors) also report greater MIL and greater MISE?

(5) To what extent does abusive supervision create a context in which MIL and MISE cannot mitigate anxiety?

(6) Do MIL or MISE mediate the relationship between transformational leadership or abusive supervision and intention to leave an organization?

These are some of the questions that the current project will attempt to answer with the aim of creating a global understanding that would shape leadership interventions, as well as interventions that reinforce MIL and a practice for finding MISE.

A team of six scholars from around the world, each with expertise in cross-cultural psychology and/or occupational stress and health research, and with unique strengths offered to the research team, are collaborating on this initiative.

The focal countries were chosen because: 1) the scholars supporting the study are deeply embedded within the countries and knowledge of the national cultures as scholars and practitioners and 2) the countries are culturally discrete in terms of cultural values, norms, temporal perspective, economic prosperity for the typical worker, and geographical location, thereby making it possible to derive inferences about the role of culture in the nomological net.

Real-World Applications

A major problem in psychosocial research is that after it is conducted and an opportunity for interventions follow, practitioners in different countries simply adopt the interventions without making sure the concept is invariant to the new context. After some time, it becomes apparent that the intervention might not have been as effective in another country as in the country of origin. The reason for that is that the focal concept was typically not tested for invariance in the different cultures before implementing the intervention. This approach results in interventions that do not fit the culture in which they are applied. The aim of the current study is to test whether MIL and MISE mediate the relationship between leadership styles and individual well-being invariantly across cultures. If the expected relationships are found to be universal, we anticipate creating educational training programs that help people draw out greater MIL and create MISE. If the relationships are found in some, but not other countries, we will be able to demarcate the cultural boundaries and caution against employing interventions not suited for certain cultures. Ultimately, leaders set the tone for experiences in the workplace. How workers cope with adverse environments may be culture-bound.