Time to rediscover task-oriented leadership? A multi-source, time-lagged study on leadership and well-being in public service jobs

Although leaders have a considerable impact on the well-being of public employees, this relationship has not yet been fully disentangled in both conceptual and empirical terms. We develop a framework of how task- and relations-oriented leadership affect well-being (i.e. hedonic, eudaimonic, social dimensions). A multi-source, time-lagged study from a large Danish municipality shows that task-oriented leadership yields positive associations with both social and eudaimonic dimensions of well-being, while for relations-oriented leadership, we only find a positive association with hedonic well-being. The findings suggest rediscovering task-oriented leadership as an important but often overlooked quality of effective leaders.