Collaborative Research: Leader Behaviors and Experiences across Life Domains

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Individuals in leadership roles represent a large group of the nation’s workforce, and their behaviors not only affect organizational effectiveness but also influence the prosperity and welfare of people in their nonwork domains. Despite their importance, prior research has paid limited attention to the nonwork domain, including family, community, and personal life, contexts that are antecedents and consequences of leadership role occupancy, leadership development, and day-to-day variation of leadership behaviors. This project takes a life-span and holistic approach to analyze how nonwork domain variables, such as community involvement and volunteering activities, lead to and are shaped by leadership role occupancy. Further, the project provides critical insights on how nonwork domain experiences might promote leadership development and how leadership development might contribute to leaders’ growth and thriving in other nonwork domains. Lastly, the project will help to uncover how and when leaders’ day-to-day behaviors and their nonwork domain experiences mutually influence each other. These findings will inform business organizations seeking to promote leadership to facilitate their economic competitiveness, and will also inform society regarding how leadership in one context may contribute to the welfare of organizations more generally.We know very little regarding how leadership in one organizational context may influence leadership and work behavior more generally, or the reciprocal relationships between leadership in multiple domains. Adopting a multi-method approach, this project will conduct three empirical studies. First, the project will use archival data (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, NLSY) collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (NLSY 79, NLSY 79 Children and Young Adults, and NLSY 97) to examine how individuals’ nonwork experiences and their leadership role occupancy at work influence each other reciprocally. The project will use mixture latent Markov modeling to capture and predict the leadership role transition patterns. Second, the project will use a longitudinal design collecting multi-wave, multi-source data to examine the interplay between leaders’ nonwork experiences and their leadership development processes using latent change score models. The third study takes a within-person perspective and analyzes how leaders’ work and nonwork experiences and behaviors are interconnected on a daily basis. The project will conduct an experience sampling study over 10 consecutive days, capturing fluctuations of leaders’ work and nonwork behaviors and experiences that are otherwise missed by surveys separated by longer time intervals; it will use dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) in data analysis. Lastly, by triangulating findings of three studies using different methods, the project will promote a more comprehensive understanding of how leaders’ work and nonwork experience affect each other across different time frames and life stages. Findings from the project will inform organizational theories regarding leadership, as well as life course perspectives that focus on the interplay between work and non-work domains, especially regarding leadership.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.