The impact of leadership preferences and personality traits on employees’ motivation
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to making workers more uncompromising with respect to issues such as quality of workplace relations and work-life balance. Hence, motivation and leadership style assume a key relevance for keeping the workforce engaged. We hypothesize that individuals may exhibit different preferences for motivational drivers and for leadership style, and that these two sets of preferences might be correlated with each other and with employees’ personality traits.
Design/methodology/approach
Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between leadership style and motivation, by also hypothesizing the possible contribution of personality traits. An online survey was developed and distributed to 150 employees or interns/trainees to collect measures related to their preference for leadership, their motivational drivers, as well as their personality traits. The data were analyzed by means of mediation and moderation analyses to disentangle the three-level relationship existing between these constructs.
Findings
Our results suggest that indeed there exists a relationship between preferences for leadership style and motivational drivers. Furthermore, one of these relationships appears to be critically mediated by specific personality traits.
Originality/value
This work is the first, to our knowledge, empirically testing the existence of a three-level relationship between leadership preferences, motivation and personality traits of employees and to contribute to disentangle their reciprocal influences.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article. The authors thank Gian Luigi Cappuccio for his help in data collection. Data are available at: https://www.doi.org/10.17632/dscr5n3jps.1.
Citation
Calluso, C. and Devetag, M.G. (2024), "The impact of leadership preferences and personality traits on employees’ motivation", Evidence-based HRM, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-01-2023-0023
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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