The relationship between leadership competence and employee engagement:

Employee engagement has been shown to lead to a number of meaningful business benefits, including increased productivity, improved individual and organizational performance, and heightened organizational commitment. Although considerable research has demonstrated the influence of line managers on the engagement of their direct reports, Harter, Schmidt, and Hayes (2002) suggest that companies could learn much about the management practices that drive business outcomes by studying their own highly engaged organizational units. The present study utilized a Fortune 500 multinational corporation’s leadership competency model multi-rater feedback and employee engagement instruments to explore the relationship between the leadership competencies of senior organizational leaders (N=163) and the engagement of employees in their organizational units. The overall model of leadership competence predicted a significant proportion of variance in engagement when utilizing either the direct report or combined rater source scores. In addition, results indicate that Integrity and Collaboration and Teaming are two specific competencies among senior leaders that appear to have meaningful positive relationships with employee engagement. Contrary to expectations, the bivariate correlation between the Self-Awareness and Adaptability competency of senior leaders and employee engagement was not significant. More surprisingly, when the other competencies were controlled statistically, the relation was negative. Finally, the direct report rater source provided competency scores that were the best predictors of employee engagement. This raises a possible concern that the relation is partly due to engaged workers providing more positive ratings and, similarly, that less engaged workers provide more negative ratings of their leaders. Results are interpreted in the context of three theoretical perspectives on employee engagement. Limitations, implications for practice, and directions for future research are also discussed.Psy.DIncludes bibliographical references (p. 115-120)by Robert N. Strou