Employee stress has been explored extensively. However, there remain a dearth of scholarship on how leadership, specifically authentic leadership, helps to reduce employee stress levels in crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in emerging economies, and to ensure employee wellness and performance using the social exchange theory. Using exploratory qualitative design and thematic analysis, data from 32 interviews with public sector employees in Ghana were analysed. Findings demonstrate that authentic leaders exhibit such characteristics as honesty, accountability, self-regulation, relational transparency, objective analysis of information, and valuing followers' contributions to arrive at decisions. These characteristics relate positively to employee job performance, wellness, and stress management.
TopIntroduction
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a stressful life situation, has significantly altered human life and resulted in overwhelming uncertainty and new behavioural “norms” such as wearing of face covering, remote working, the way daily activities are carried out, and several changes in work schedules. While some employees have to work full time remotely, others have to combine working remotely and in-person. These changes in work schedules, coupled with the uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in different psychological conditions like anxiety, depression and stress at the workplace.
Stress, “an unpleasant psychological process that occurs in response to environmental pressures” (Robbins & Judge, 2017, p. 65), can be task-based, role-based, environmental and social. Specifically, it can be as a result of workload, poor supervision, bad bosses and any of these combined, with any diversity issue can lead to stress. While some authors indicate that stress has no negative effect on employee performance (Muis et al., 2021), many scholars opine that stress affect organisations negatively. These negative effects include decline in employee performance (Khan et al., 2022), counterproductive behaviour like extreme anger (De Clercq et al., 2019; Jun et al., 2018), frequent absenteeism (Abdullah & Lee, 2012), and employee wellness (Tsui, 2021; Abdullah & Lee, 2012). Due to these negative effects, the effective management of employee stress has become a strategic activity for managers of organisations. Therefore, there is a call to adopt an appropriate leadership style which will help manage the stress, identify and implement employee wellness programmes to prevent its potential negative effects.
Wellness is a holistic and self-driven process comprising of multi-dimensions of wellbeing, which ultimately promote an optimal, purposeful and improved quality of life (Kumar et al., 2022). Workplace wellness results in environment that supports healthy lifestyles for employees and their families through systems and structures implemented by leaders. Organisations derive several benefits when they ensure employee wellness such as improved employee performance (Ford et al., 2011; Warr & Nielsen, 2018; Wu et al., 2017), stress (Wu et al., 2017; Hoert et al., 2018), employee turnover, improved employee relations and employee health (Hoert et al., 2018). Consequently, leaders have to adopt the appropriate style and implement strategies and programmes to ensure employee wellness to experience all these benefits. The question then is, what leadership style should leaders adopt to ensure employees stress is well managed and enhance employee wellness to increase performance?