Personal resources and leadership behavior

Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of leaders’ personal resources in the work-related context. The main goal is to explore the influence of leaders’ mindfulness and resilience on leadership behavior and employees’ work-related outcomes based on the integrative framework by Good et al. (2016). The first study explores leaders’ mindfulness and resilience as potential antecedents of servant and destructive leadership and the mediating effect of these leadership behaviors regarding employees’ trust in the leader and perceived psychological safety climate. The second study investigates the mediating effect of servant leadership between leaders’ mindfulness as well as leaders’ resilience and employees’ perceived stress. The third study explores potential relationships between heart rate variability as indicator for resilience and constructive (servant, transformational, and transactional) leadership behavior as well as whether changes in heart rate variability due to a stressful event are related to resilience. In summary, this dissertation reveals insights regarding personal resources and leadership behavior. Identifying the role of leaders’ mindfulness and resilience as antecedents of servant and destructive leadership represents a major step towards the understanding of leadership behavior. Furthermore, servant leadership represents an important leadership behavior regarding employees’ perceived psychological safety climate, stress, and trust in the leader. Furthermore, it shows insight in neurophysiological processes in the organizational context and their effects on leadership behavior.