• Rita Berger, Jan Philipp Czakert, Jan-Paul Leuteritz, and David Leiva.
• Department of Social Psychology and Quantitative Psychology, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
• Front Psychol. 2019 Jan 1; 10: 2788.

AbstractFollowing the call of recent reviews on leadership and well-being, the purpose of this study is to examine how and when two contrasting leadership styles, transformational leadership (TFL) and passive-avoidant leadership (PAL), are related to employees' anxiety and thereby either promote or inhibit employees' well-being. Using the prominent job demands-resources (JD-R) model as a theoretical framework, we propose that the relationship between leadership behavior and anxiety is mediated by organizational job demands, namely, role ambiguity (RA), and job resources, namely, team climate for learning (TCL), as well as moderated by autonomy as important job characteristic. A sample of 501 knowledge workers, working in teams in a German research and development (R&D) organization, answered an online survey. We tested moderated multiple mediation models using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results demonstrated that the relationships between TFL as well as PAL on the one hand and anxiety on the other hand were fully mediated by RA and TCL. Job autonomy moderated the quality of the leadership-job demand relationship for TFL and PAL. This paper contributes to understanding the complex relationship between leadership and followers' well-being taking into account a combination of mediating and moderating job demands and resources. This is the first study that examines the effects of TFL and PAL on well-being taking into account the job demand RA and team processes and autonomy as resources.Copyright © 2019 Berger, Czakert, Leuteritz and Leiva.

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