I can't get no Sleep: The Role of Leaders' Health and Leadership Behavior on Employees' Sleep Quality

ABSTRACT

A leader’s role is often associated with increased psychosocial demands, which could lead to rumination during nonwork time. Leader rumination might trigger a cascade of mechanisms causing employee rumination and eventually persistent employee sleep problems. In a three-wave study, we examined whether leader rumination predicts changes in employee sleep quality linked by employee rumination. As a possible serial mechanism underlying the trickle-down effect of leader rumination on employee rumination, we investigated leaders’ general health and resource-oriented leadership behaviour. Based on self-report data from 94 leaders and their 332 employees, we found support for a multilevel mediation model in which leader rumination negatively affected employee sleep quality via employee rumination while controlling for baseline measures and a shared work environment (workload). Finally, leader rumination was negatively related to employee sleep quality via the serial mediation of leader health, resource-oriented leadership, and rumination perceived by the team members. The results demonstrate the importance of leader rumination for employees’ sleep quality nearly 2 years later and provide knowledge that can be used to expand and optimize interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Rumination
• trickle-down effect
• leader health
• leadership behaviour
• sleep quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2022.2077198

Notes

1. To make full use of the available data, missing values of employees in the control variables general health, negative life events, workload, rumination, and sleep quality at T1 were replaced by mean substitution in 11 cases. The results remain unchanged in pattern if the missing values are not substituted.

2. We also analysed the hypotheses without general health, negative life events, workload, and the autoregressors rumination and sleep quality as control variables, and we only considered age and gender as control variables. The same regression coefficients remained significant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grant F 2199 in the context of NEW OSH ERA (New and Emerging Risks in Occupational Safety and Health) within the European Commission Sixth Framework Programme (ERA-NET scheme). [2199].