Leadership Quality and the Sources of Well-being
The quality of leadership has a big impact on well-being. Using the JD-R Model, we can see leadership as a resource for people at work.
Originally published in August 2022. Republished on August 16 2026, with minor corrections; the argument is unchanged.
Well-being
Last weekend, the Belgian newspaper De Tijd ran an article on the challenge of mental well-being and burnout — essentially an interview with Arnold Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti. Coincidentally, De Standaard published an interview with Wilmar Schaufeli the same day. The researchers gave their view on what burnout exactly is, on its antecedents and consequences, and on how we should deal with it.
Today there is a lot of talk about a pandemic of mental health issues, and I am glad to see things put in perspective.
- There is no pandemic of burnout. It is still difficult to say how many people suffer from it, but apparently about 2% of the working population is affected.
- The problem has worsened, but it is not new. Throughout history there have been many examples of people with symptoms of burnout. In the past this was misdiagnosed and not linked to work.
- A questionnaire cannot replace a medical diagnosis. A survey can reveal risk factors, but it is dangerous to translate survey results into an overall statistic on the prevalence of burnout. Let us be careful not to invent or exaggerate a challenge.
- How you measure burnout affects the metric. Some surveys work from a limited definition and measure only exhaustion, or dissatisfaction, or another related concept. HR should be critical about the tools it uses, and should never jump to conclusions.
Who is responsible?
Responsibility for mental well-being does not lie exclusively with one of the parties involved, employer or employee. It is far more complicated than that. Employers do carry a large share, however, because they can influence the quality of the conditions in which people have to work. They cannot control everything, but they can influence a great deal.
Putting the responsibility on the individual employee implies that the solution lies in that employee's behaviour. As Wilmar Schaufeli puts it, we should not send someone to mindfulness training when the context they have to work in is not OK.
It is like hanging an air freshener in a filthy toilet. The solution might be worse than the original problem.
Go upstream
We need to go upstream and work as far as possible on the sources of mental health problems, and therefore also on the sources of mental well-being. Going upstream means taking a systemic approach: looking at the different aspects and at how they interact. How someone experiences work depends on processes, procedures, leadership, culture and climate — and on their personal situation as well.
One model I would recommend when thinking about well-being and engagement is the JD-R model, developed by Demerouti, Bakker and colleagues. It captures the need for balance between sources of energy and sources of mental workload. When the two are in balance, or when the sources of energy outweigh the workload, the situation is OK. Sources of energy include personal ones.
When I founded Otolith, this notion of balance was at the forefront of our mission. An otolith enables vertebrates to sense direction, balance and acceleration. For people to feel well, they need balance.
Human contact
One important source of well-being is the contact people have with others. Customers, patients and citizens give our work its purpose — but they can be a source of frustration at the same time. The growing aggressiveness, or the indifference, of the people we want to help or save is very confronting.
The first professions in which mental health issues were identified were healthcare and teaching. We now know burnout can affect anyone, though people working on the front line, in close contact with customers, may be somewhat more susceptible than those working "safely" in the back office.
This is also one of the reasons why tensions arise between customer-facing staff and back-office colleagues who seem not to feel the pulse of the market — and it feeds the sense of not being appreciated.
Social support
Ever since research on stress and burnout took off, we have known that social support is one of the main sources of energy, and therefore one of the antidotes to negative or excessive stress.
People are able to work hard and achieve challenging targets when they feel supported and appreciated. Without recognition, they end up on an emotional treadmill: they work hard without appreciation, so they work harder still. And when the appreciation does not come, they become cynical. Then they become exhausted and detach from work.
One of the most important protagonists of this social support is the leader. Appreciation and recognition can of course come from colleagues, customers and others too, but when the leader appears to ignore someone's achievements, the odds are that well-being suffers. The leader plays an important role in fulfilling the need for achievement. Only a minority of people seem able to keep going without social support.
And that brings us to leadership quality.
Leadership quality
There are two dimensions to leadership quality: intensity and content.
Intensity
I would like to introduce the concept of the right level of leadership, which is also present in the work of Rob Kaiser. We know that too much or too little of a quality can lead to problems. Think about parenthood. Parents can be fussy and intervene too much in what a child does, even well into adulthood. We all know the consequences. We also know what happens when parents neglect their children.
The same holds for leadership. Leaders can be too present or too absent. They can be too controlling, or they can lack steering capacity. They can be very operational, or too strategic and too abstract.
Leaders need to adapt not only to the needs and expectations of their team members, but also to a changing context. In times of crisis, leadership looks different than in times of peace and predictability. There is no one-size-fits-all leadership. In theory, leaders should adapt their style as many times as there are people and situations. Models like situational leadership fall short because they offer a simplified, typology-style approach, and books about heroic leadership exploits miss the point entirely. There is simply no single way.
Let us also not forget that leadership takes place within a political context that the leader has to manage as well.
Leaders need to be empathic so that they can adapt their style to the needs of their people and of the organisation. They need to be fair, kind and collaborative. These very human behaviours do not exclude a focus on results or on customers. They create the social and psychological environment in which people can thrive and perform. Creating that context is the essence of leadership — and, for that matter, of HR.
Content
When I help organisations develop their leadership, I never focus on a long list of competencies or a backpack full of techniques, tools and models. I focus on the role leaders have to fulfil. If they need particular techniques to fulfil it, those can be introduced then.
These are the areas in which leaders play a role:
- building an environment of trust and psychological safety
- making sure people understand the meaningfulness of what they do — the why
- helping people grow, developing their skills and their sustainable employability
- steering on progress and on values
- crafting an engaging context in which people want to collaborate, contribute and change
I have worked with hundreds of leaders and many management teams. The problem they often face is that the role is not clear to them. They tend to hold a technical, task-based view of what leadership is. Because they have to combine the leadership role with operational tasks, they struggle to balance leading and performing.
Helping people move forward usually requires a long-term, indirect and adaptive approach. When leaders focus on tasks and short-term outcomes — the what of leadership — they neglect the longer-term development of people and teams. They are under pressure to deliver, not to develop.
The essence is human behaviour
We just need to be less efficient in the short run to be more effective in the long run.
If leadership is based on pushing people and putting them under pressure, it is not sustainable. Leadership becomes sustainable when it rests on human behaviours: empathy, kindness, reciprocity, fairness, honesty, compassion, modesty, humility and respect. These are all trust-enhancing behaviours, and they require space.
If we focus too heavily on efficiency and target achievement, we destroy the experience people need. I have said it many times: sometimes we just need to be less efficient in the short run to be more effective in the long run.
Leaders who manage this create a social context that gives people energy and makes them more resilient. People working in an environment like that are able and willing to work hard — and to keep their balance.
Leaders shape the context.
