What does leadership do to the leader? Using a pattern-oriented approach to investigate the association of daily leadership profiles and daily leader well-being

Recent research on leadership acknowledged that leadership behavior is not only related to followers’ but also to leaders’ well-being. Additionally, previous findings suggest that leadership behaviors show day-to-day variation and that multiple leadership styles can be present within one leader at the same time. Therefore, adopting an actor-centric perspective and applying a pattern-oriented approach we build on existing research to shed light on the daily relationship of leadership profiles and leader well-being. We will rely on the full-range model of leadership and conservation of resources theory to investigate (1) if daily profiles of transformational, contingent reward, management-by-exception active, management-by-exception passive, and laissez-faire leadership behaviors exist for leaders, (2) if profile membership is stable or dynamic across one week, and (3) if the leadership profiles are differentially related to leaders’ daily thriving and time pressure, as well as their daily emotional exhaustion, positive affect, and negative affect. We propose that some leadership profiles can be both beneficial (i.e., associated with increased positive affect and decreased negative affect via enhanced thriving) and harmful (i.e., associated with increased emotional exhaustion via increased time pressure) for leaders’ well-being at the same time. We will test our hypotheses in a daily diary study over five workdays (i.e., one typical working week) with two measurement points per day in a planned sample of 250 leaders and their followers. We will apply multilevel latent profile analysis to identify leadership profiles and perform BCH analysis to investigate the daily relationship of the leadership profiles and the outcomes.