Leadership and Well-Being: Bidirectional Effects and Contingencies

Leadership and employee well-being are closely intertwined in contemporary organizations. While leadership is widely regarded as a central social influence shaping employees’ well-being, growing evidence suggests that leadership–well-being relationships are more complex than traditionally assumed. Across three chapters, this cumulative dissertation shows that effects may differ across domains of well-being, depend on individual contingencies, and unfold in both directions between leaders and followers. The first two chapters cover findings from a controlled laboratory paradigm to investigate leadership effects on affective-evaluative, cognitive, and physiological indicators of follower well-being. Results indicate that leadership effects are not uniform across well-being domains and may involve simultaneous benefits and costs, such that positively evaluated leadership behaviors can co-occur with physiological strain among vulnerable followers. In particular, followers were more satisfied with charismatic leadership but showed increased rumination, if pre-treatment stress levels were high. The third chapter addresses the reverse direction of influence and shows that reduced follower well-being can elicit heightened leader rumination alongside constructive leadership behavior, highlighting the co-occurrence of cognitive strain and constructive action. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of domain specificity, individual differences as contingencies, and directionality for understanding leadership–well-being dynamics. By integrating experimental methods with multi-domain indicators of well-being, this dissertation contributes to leadership research by moving beyond simplified accounts of uniformly beneficial or harmful leadership and highlights implications for contingency-sensitive leadership development and well-being interventions.