Responding to the Challenge of Employee Engagement During Uncertain Times: Adaptive Leadership is the Answer

Introduction

Leadership has been extensively studied in organizational scholarship. Scholarly literature has published umpteen studies on leadership for several decades. However, ever since 1980s, the scholarly attention has shifted from behavioral contingency approaches to leadership towards the concept of adaptive leadership (McKechnie et al., 2020). The contemporary business environment has been badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and ever since the outbreak of the viral disease; organizations across the globe are reeling with numerous challenges (Wang et al., 2020). The COVID-19 context has further increased the turbulence and uncertainty of the business environment, as different organizations have to shift to virtual mode of operations in no time, and business prospects dwindled due to anxiety and fear in the minds of customers. Importantly, these are the very conditions under which adaptive leadership thrives (Baker, Irwin, & Mathews, 2020). Consequently, it is vital to exercise effective adaptive leadership, in order to respond to current business environment. Nonetheless, the present unprecedented conditions have added to the anxiety of employees and organizations. Numerous studies indicate that a large chunk of employees finding it difficult to stay engaged with their work (Chanana & Sangeeta, 2020). As a result, it poses a grave challenge to design effective employee engagement strategies. Recent studies indicate that globally, organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to bolster employee engagement rates, particularly in contemporary times (Quantum workplace Best Place to Work, 2020).

Along the similar lines, the extant literature has suggested the need for adaptive leadership to achieve organizational performance and competitive advantage (Dunn, 2020). Interestingly, an adaptive leader is heedful to the dynamism of the present business landscape and responds with appropriate strategies. In addition, the present business landscape is forcing adaptive leaders to leverage human capital and design a resilient organization capable of dealing with environmental turbulence and complexities. All this in turn, lead organizations pursue adaptive leadership as a business imperative measure (Yuki & Mahsud, 2010). However, there is still a paucity of academic research, particularly the empirical investigation on adaptive leadership. In this vein, our endeavor to explore a linkage between adaptive leadership and employee attitudinal outcomes (employee engagement) is a valuable addition to the extant body of research. More importantly, the domain of employee engagement has been widely researched during past few decades and following antecedents to employee engagement are identified namely job characteristics, organizational culture, supportive leadership styles, organizational trust, and individual characteristics. Also, the extant literature indicates a linkage between leadership and motivation, job satisfaction, and competitive advantage; still there is considerable gap in literature regarding the role of leadership to nurture employee engagement within organizations.

In this line of thought, the current study explores a potential linkage of adaptive leadership and employee engagement in the present COVID-19 context. In this study, we propose a conceptual model that focuses on adaptive leader’s relational behavior and its impact on employee engagement. To this end, adaptive leader’s role in supporting organizational learning, communicating the vision, and developing the social capital are linked to affective, cognitive, and physical engagement of employees.