Leading on Empty? Daily Maintenance, Morning Energy, and the Spillover to Employee Well-Being and Work Engagement

Topic

This thesis examines how leaders’ daily recovery relates to morning vigor and employees’ work experiences. It focuses on sleep quality, psychological detachment, leader morning vigor, perceived leader vigor, and employees’ daily affect, stress, and work engagement.

Relevance

Leadership is not only shaped by stable traits or general leadership style. It is also enacted from day to day and depends on the resources a leader can bring into specific work situations. When leaders are mentally recovered and sufficiently energised, they may be better able to be present, attentive, and supportive. This thesis therefore contributes to the discussion on sustainable leadership by examining how daily recovery, visible leader energy, and psychological safety relate to employees’ everyday work experiences.

Findings

The results did not provide clear support for the full hypothesised spillover chain. Leaders’ evening recovery showed only limited evidence of being associated with their self-reported morning vigor, and leader-reported morning vigor did not clearly translate into employees’ perceptions of leader vigor on the same day. However, employees’ perceived leader vigor was consistently associated with their own daily experiences, including higher positive affect, lower stress, and higher work engagement. Psychological safety also emerged as an important contextual factor.

Implications for Practice

• Leaders should attend not only to their own recovery, but also to how their energy and engagement come across to employees in everyday interactions.
• What a leader feels is not automatically visible to the team. Helping leaders express engagement, and not only experience it, can make a real difference for how employees feel.
• A stable and trusting climate, in which employees feel psychologically safe, provides a baseline condition for daily engagement and well-being.

Methods

The study used a dyadic daily diary design carried out over ten working days in five Swiss organisations. The final sample comprised five leaders and 31 employees, which yielded 50 leader-day observations and 266 employee-day observations. Leaders completed a short survey each morning, and employees completed a survey at the end of each working day. The data were analysed with multilevel models that account for the repeated daily measurements and the nested structure of the dataset.