Experimental Field Investigation of Leadership Practices Supportive of Work-Satisfaction, Engagement, Performance and Creativity

Current trends in the labor market raise the importance of research on measures that can help workers to adapt to changes and increase inclusion in work-life. New technology is making many jobs obsolete, and the jobs that technology creates are constantly changing, resulting in a need for workers who adapt easily to new challenges and have innovative ideas. This is stressful to many employees, which may lead to workplace disengagement and poor performance. As such, it is more important now than ever that leaders create a work environment that supports employees and encourages their development. Still, empirical research demonstrates great variation in the extent to which leaders create such a supportive work environment. Our primary objective is to break new ground in the empirical understanding of training that inspires and sustains supportive practices among leaders in the workplace. We will develop and test a KNOWLEDGE intervention that provides leaders with an understanding of supportive leadership practices; and an ENACT intervention that increases leaders’ awareness about the malleability of human potential and how leaders are responsible for scaffolding others’ development. We conduct a series of large-scale randomized field trials with, in total, several hundred leaders and their employees to test both the combined and the individual effects of the KNOWLEDGE and ENACT treatments, measuring the impact on leadership practices and on employees’ work satisfaction, engagement, performance and intention to quit, using data from multiple surveys, administrative records and video recordings. Our extensive data collection will allow us to investigate if, why, how, when and for whom the treatments are effective. Provided that beneficial treatment effects are found, one key goal is to ensure that organizations all over Norway will be able to utilize the knowledge gained about which leadership practices help in increasing employee satisfaction and performance and how to facilitate enactment of such practices using easily scalable leadership-training tools. Progress: - We successfully developed all the necessary measures in Norwegian as outlined in the proposal. - We have developed a short leadership training that increases leaders' belief in their employees' ability, explains how important they are to enable their employees to contribute, and provides them with concrete practices that support employees' satisfaction, engagement, and performance. The intervention was tested in an RCT with 130 leaders and over 300 employees. The results were published in Management Science (https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02170). We conducted a field experiment in a large corporation to investigate the effects of supportive leadership behaviors on employee satisfaction, engagement, and performance. Treated leaders received a brief training promoting leadership behaviors that encourage, assure, and value employee efforts. Our experimental design allowed us to observe leaders and employees in a subsequent meeting. We find that the leadership training affected the leaders’ supportive behaviors and thereby increased employees’ self-reported satisfaction and engagement during the meeting by 0.28 and 0.18 standard deviations, respectively. The effect on team performance was 0.13 standard deviations but was not significant. - We have developed two online leadership modules to foster a growth mindset in leaders and have tested whether these modules, in combination with an enactment tool, i.e., a goal-setting form, can improve the effectiveness of a leadership training program. The modules were tested in an RCT with 160 leaders and over 1000 employees. We are currently preparing the working paper. - We are currently developing a knowledge treatment targeting leaders’ social skills which we aim to test with a company Uganda with over 200 leaders. - We are working on several papers on supportiv leadership using the administrative data collected in the RCTs also involving the PhD student who is assigned to the project.

Current trends in the labor market raise the importance of research on measures that can help workers to adapt to changes and increase inclusion in work-life. New technology is making many jobs obsolete, and the jobs that technology creates are constantly changing, resulting in a need for workers who adapt easily to new challenges and have innovative ideas. This is stressful to many employees, which may lead to workplace disengagement and poor performance. As such, it is more important now than ever that leaders create a work environment that supports employees and encourages their development. Still, empirical research demonstrates great variation in the extent to which leaders create such a supportive work environment. Our primary objective is to break new ground in the empirical understanding of training that inspires and sustains supportive practices among leaders in the workplace. We will develop and test a KNOWLEDGE intervention that provides leaders with an understanding of supportive leadership practices; and an ENACT intervention that increases leaders’ awareness about the malleability of human potential and how leaders are responsible for scaffolding others’ development. We conduct a large-scale randomized field trial with several hundred leaders and their employees to test both the combined and the individual effect of the KNOWLEDGE and ENACT treatments, measuring the impact on leadership practices and on employees’ work satisfaction, engagement, performance and creativity, using data from multiple surveys, administrative records and video recordings. Our extensive data collection will allow us to investigate if, why, how, when and for whom the treatments are effective. Provided that beneficial treatment effects are found, one key goal is to ensure that organizations all over Norway will be able to utilize the easily scalable leadership-training programs produced in this project, for free.