Financial stress and leadership behavior: The role of leader gender.
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Connects with: @choi2020 @kim2006 @sinclair2016
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spoelma2024 - p. 317
Personal financial stress, “the perception that one does not have sufficient financial resources to meet one’s needs” (Meuris & Leana, 2018, p. 400), is the number one source of stress for people across the globe (Growth from Knowledge, 2015).
spoelma2024 - p. 317
While these advances are meaningful, we have a limited understanding of how personal financial stress impacts one key role within organizations: leadership. Leaders have crucial responsibilities in organizations, such as strategizing, planning, and managing employee performance (G. Yukl, 2012).
spoelma2024 - p. 317
As such, although we have an emerging understanding of how financial stress impacts one’s own job outcomes, by considering how financial stress affects leadership behavior, we can shed light on the unique mechanisms through which one person’s financial state influences others.
spoelma2024 - p. 318
Specifically, we draw from the tend-andbefriend model of stress (Taylor, 2002; Taylor et al., 2000) to propose that financial stress also is associated with elevated communion-striving motivation and empathic leadership. The tendand-befriend model suggests that, in the face of stress, people experience heightened motivation to affiliate with others. We focus on empathic leadership as it represents a prototypical affiliative behavior enacted by leaders (Kellett et al., 2002; Steinmann et al., 2016).
spoelma2024 - p. 319
Financial stress occurs when people perceive that they are unable to fulfill financial obligations. This occurs, for instance, when “one faces a threat or actual loss of money in combination with a lack of other resources to make ends meet”
spoelma2024 - p. 319
Other similar stressors tend to be more distal predictors of these outcomes or tied to specific roles at work. Job stress, for example, refers to the “process by which workplace psychological experiences and demands (stressors) produce both short-term (strains) and long-term changes in mental and physical health” (Ganster & Rosen, 2013, p. 1088).
spoelma2024 - p. 322
Financial stress was measured with Netemeyer et al.’s (2018) five-item scale of Money Management Stress (α = .89). Participants responded to items (e.g., “Because of my money situation, I feel I will never have the things I want in my life”) on a 5-point scale (1 = does not describe me, 5 = describes me extremely well).
Note: This is a subscale of financial well-being