2024.06.21

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Watch a video of this post or read it below.

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Study Probes Leader Behavior Under Stress

For a long time, scholarly research treated “leadership” as if it was a constant behavior. That is, a leader with laissez-faire style always displayed behaviors congruent with it. Same for transformational leadership, etc.

A smaller but growing body of inquiry is demonstrating that leadership is subject to situational influences.

A 2022 paper entitled When Your Boss Is Under Pressure: On the Relationships Between Leadership Inconsistency, Leader and Follower Strain¹ lays out a nice synopsis of the research in that area so far and extends it.

Their study looked at staff members’ perceptions of leadership inconsistency as measured by transformational and abusive styles, during stressful and routine situations, as well as the impact it had on employee health (as measured by strain).

They find:

• Employees perceive differences in their direct supervisor’s leadership behavior during stressful and routine times.

• Employees who perceived more leadership inconsistency also reported experiencing more strain on themselves.

• Employees perceived more leadership inconsistency when they perceived the leaders themselves were strained.

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Leadership Inconsistency

The variation of leadership behavior within a person is called leadership inconsistency. In practice it looks like a leader displaying different – sometimes contradictory – behavior in different situations. (Perhaps you are immediately thinking about a boss you once had…)

Often, the leader looks drastically different under calm circumstances and stressful ones. The leader might even know that they aren’t at their best when stressed but not realize that their leadership behaviors change and that they are doing measurable harm to their teams.

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Transformational Leadership vs Abusive Supervision

There are many ways to conceptualize leadership. For this study, the researchers chose the contrasting concepts of transformational leadership and abusive supervision. Other studies have looked at transformational leadership versus other well-defined constructs such as laissez-faire leadership and passive leadership.

Transformational leadership has been having a moment. If you are unfamiliar, it has four components:

• Idealized influence – the professional and moral role model function of leaders,
• Inspirational motivation – inspiring employees with compelling visions,
• Individualized consideration – recognizing and supporting employees’ personal needs, and
• Intellectual stimulation – encouraging employees to think innovatively.

Previous research has found some positive associations between transformational leadership and the well-being of employees.

Abusive supervision on the other hand has been shown to be correlated with employee depression, anxiety symptoms, psychosomatic complaints, burnout, and more. Abusive supervision describes situations when the leader is hostile verbally and non-verbally and includes criticism, rudeness, yelling, and even tantrums.

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Employee Strain

One indicator of employee health is strain. It is a measure of their emotional and cognitive irritation.

The researchers hypothesize that when there are large inconsistencies in leadership, it is psychologically taxing on the employees – they’ve got to routinely adjust to following “different" leaders.

For example, when leaders are stressed and suddenly reduce their transformational leadership behaviors, employees need to compensate on their own for that loss.

Or when leaders are stressed and fall into abusive supervision behaviors, employees need to figure out how to cope with their own resulting stress and to navigate the volatile workday.

It is not costless – in terms of energy and other personal resources – for employees to keep adjusting to inconsistent leadership behaviors and to cope with the consequences.

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Study Details

The researchers used a convenience sample (i.e., asked people from their networks) which in this case is probably okay as a starting point. 304 individuals participated. 77.3% identified as male, which is a bit skewed, so interpret the outcomes with that in mind (e.g., to what extent do we think that women would answer differently?). Additionally, this study was conducted in Germany.

Transformational leadership was measured using a shortened version of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Abusive supervision was measured using the Abusive Supervision Scale. Participants rated their direct supervisor with two contexts in mind: under routine conditions and under stressful conditions.

(Side note – One wonders what happens when routine conditions are already quite stressful and “stressful” conditions are more of a crisis?)

Leadership inconsistency was measured separately for transformational leadership and abusive supervision. The degree of leadership inconsistency for each was calculated as the difference between perceived leadership behaviors under the routine conditions and under stress.

The researchers used the Irritation Scale to measure employee strain and slightly modified the questions to measure employees’ perception of their leader’s strain.

(Side note: One wonders if the employees’ perception of leaders’ strain would match the leader’s rating of their own strain, but that makes the study design harder.)

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Outcomes

Employees perceive differences in their direct supervisor’s leadership behavior during stressful and routine times.

Employees who perceived more leadership inconsistency also reported experiencing more strain on themselves.

Employees perceived more leadership inconsistency when they perceived the leaders themselves were strained.

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Takeaways for Leaders

If you’re a leader who frequently operates in stressful situations, this is your wakeup call to step back and get some objective perspective on the degree to which your leadership behaviors under stress are consistent with those you display when you’re in calm circumstances. Consider accessing your in-house coaches or take it as a sign that it’s time to hire an external one.

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Takeaways for Coaches

1. Terminology

Knowing that there is a term for when leaders behave differently in different situations (i.e., leadership inconsistency) can be very powerful for your clients who report to sometimes-volatile leaders. It can also be helpful for some of them to have the term abusive supervision for what they experience at work.

2. Applications

If you coach leaders directly, consider:

• incorporating questions about leadership inconsistency as part of your next round of direct report interviews;
• focusing a coaching session on their perceptions of their own leadership while stressed versus calm as well as how often they are stressed versus calm at work.

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¹Research Citation: Klebe, L., K. Klug, and J. Felfe. (2022) When Your Boss Is Under Pressure: On the Relationships Between Leadership Inconsistency, Leader and Follower Strain. Frontiers in Psychology. 13:816258. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.816258

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