Disagreements on leadership styles between supervisors and employees are related to employees’ well-being and work team outcomes

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to analyse how disagreement between supervisors and their subordinates on leadership style (transformational and transactional) is related to employees’ outcomes, considering both work team characteristics (social support and conflict), and employees’ well-being (burnout, work engagement and poor health). The role played by the size of the work team is also analysed. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The sample is composed of 24 supervisors and 468 employees working in grocery stores of a large retail chain; 369 employees worked in 14 medium-size work teams and 99 employees worked in small-size work teams. Disagreement on leadership style between supervisors and their subordinates has been computed as the difference between the score reported by the supervisor and the score reported by the worker on the same items. Linear regression analyses, ANOVA and multilevel analyses have been computed. FINDINGS: Multilevel analyses results showed that, considering the disagreement on transformational and transactional leadership style and the work team size, only disagreement on the transformational leadership style is related to employees’ outcomes. Higher clustering effects, meaning that the between-groups variability was bigger than the variability within groups, have been found in conflict between members and burnout. Furthermore, results showed that work team size moderated the relationship between disagreement on transformational leadership style and burnout. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: In order to enhance workers’ well-being and produce a better working climate it could be useful to focus on reducing the disagreement on leadership style between leaders and theirs subordinates. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Disagreement between supervisors and their subordinates, in order to understand the role played by leadership on work team characteristics and workers’ well-being, has rarely been studied before.