Strengths-based leadership

Strengths-based leadership helps employees identify, utilize, and develop their strengths.Does such leadership facilitate employee work engagement and performance?In this study, we integrate Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theories to hypothesize that strengths-based leadership is positively related to employee task performance through employee work engagement, and that this effect is moderated by LMX quality.We collected survey data at two time points -with one month interval -from 556 Chinese workers and their managers (N = 104 teams).The results of path modelling showed that strengths-based leadership was positively related to supervisor-ratings of employee task performance via employee work engagement.As predicted, the positive relation between strengths-based leadership and employee work engagement was stronger when LMX was of high-quality.However, the predicted moderated-mediation effect was not supported.We discuss the implications of these findings for research on strengths-based leadership, as well as the practical implications.