title: Exploring the leadership of employee wellbeing
Creators: name: Smith, Lisa
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: employee wellbeing
subject: leadership

description: Employee wellbeing has significant positive and negative impacts on workers. Employees can experience energy (Bakker et al., 2023), perceptions of fulfilment (Thorsteinsen &amp; Vitterso, 2020), and thriving at work (Dhiman, 2021). In contrast, poor employee wellbeing contributes to psychological distress (Boddy et al., 2021), mental illnesses (Leiter &amp; Maslach, 2023), physical illnesses, diseases (Bakker &amp; de Vries, 2021), and fatalities (Bakker &amp; de Vries, 2021; Goh et al., 2016; Timming, 2020). In addition to these recognised negative impacts to employees, workplaces continue to become more stressful (Koinig &amp; Diehl, 2021; Rudolph et al., 2020), therefore, it is vital to further investigate employee wellbeing. Exploring the employee wellbeing and leadership literature showed that leaders and their leadership extensively and directly impact employee wellbeing (Inceoglu et al., 2021; Vincent-Hoper et al., 2017). Literature suggests that leaders and their leadership can support employee wellbeing (Inceoglu et al., 2021) through workload management, job control and support (Goh et al., 2016). Particularly as workplace stressors likely arise from job demands and exposure to damaging work environments including toxic leadership (Brough et al., 2021). While leaders are significant, other workplace actors, followers, and an organisation actor, were also present in the literature (Horstmann &amp; Remdisch, 2019). Unfortunately, research is inconsistent and ambiguous regarding workplace actor roles and their involvement in the leadership of employee wellbeing. Consequently, to better understand workplace actors in the leadership of employee wellbeing, two research questions were posed in this study: 1) How are workplace actors involved in the leadership of employee wellbeing? 2) Why are workplace actors involved in the leadership of employee wellbeing? To answer these questions, the leadership of employee wellbeing was explored in two Australian workplaces through a qualitative case study (Stake, 1995). The case study involved interviewing 23 participants in the case organisations, undertaking 12 observations, and reviewing 20 organisational documents. Collected data were analysed according to Braun and Clarke's (2022) reflexive thematic analysis approach, which complemented the social constructivist paradigm (Grandy, 2018) which is at the core of this research. Six themes were constructed from analysed data and contributed to answering the two research questions. Based on the findings located in the six themes, key contributions to theory and practice are made. An expanded definition of employee wellbeing is offered, and a framework was developed from the findings which contributes a clarified understanding of four distinct human workplace actors and two non-human actants involved in the leadership of employee wellbeing. In addition, the framework contributes the identification of four core leader practices to enact and enable the leadership of employee wellbeing: 1) establishing a foundation of employee wellbeing within the organisation, 2) structuring the organisation to enable leadership of employee wellbeing, 3) establishing and enabling interpersonal connection and practices, and 4) enabling self-leadership practices. The framework also offers extended understanding of individual and follower involvement in the leadership of employee wellbeing through distinct intra-individual processes including self-leadership. Answers to the second research question contribute expanded understanding of the dual motivations for workplace actor involvement in the leadership of employee wellbeing: 1) for the betterment of the business, and 2) because employees are human, and therefore have inherent worth.