As concerns for healthcare employee retention have grown, organizations are seeking new ways to improve employees’ well-being. Drawing on the job demands-resources model, we identify two key predictors of affective well-being (i.e. leadership quality and workload) and articulate ways in which a sense of career calling moderates the main effects.
Responses from 396 employees working in 18 healthcare facilities in the Midwest USA were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine support for the hypotheses’ main and moderating effects.
Results indicated that leadership quality related positively to affective well-being and workload related negatively. In addition, calling interacted with leadership quality, not workload, to influence well-being such that the stronger the calling, the weaker the relationship. In post hoc analyses, this pattern of interaction was found to apply to both measures of positive and negative affect.
Our study provides guidance for healthcare organizations, emphasizing the critical role of high-quality leadership in enhancing employees’ well-being. Our findings help healthcare leaders identify where to focus their efforts. Specifically, the study suggests that employees with a weaker calling stand to gain the most in affective well-being from high-quality leadership.
This study is the first one to empirically examine the interaction effect between leadership and calling as it influences employees’ well-being. Additionally, it contributes to the existing literature by examining affective well-being among healthcare workers, a combination that has been omitted by past research.
