How Female Leadership Can Improve Employee Well-Being and Staff Satisfaction?

oday‘s globalized nature of competitiveness is placing more pressure on organizations to employ effective leaders, males or females, who are capable of improving employee well-being and staff satisfaction. There are many academic studies that focus on the managerial factors that drive employee well-being and staff satisfaction. Female leadership is one such area that plays a critical role and is a strategic prerequisite for business success in today’s hypercompetitive environment. For example, Mary T. Barra (CEO of General Motors), Indra Nooyi (CEO of PepsiCo) and Ginni Rometty (CEO of IBM) have been posited as female leaders as they converted many brilliant people to follow them.

Female leaders can identify individual needs of their employees and subsequently develop a culture of trust, openness and honesty by fostering better relationships between management and employees, which potentially increases staff morale and retention. In addition, organizational structure can manifest itself as a channel for coordinating intellectual capital within companies. Female leaders reshape organizational structures to be more effective when the command center of organizations can disseminate information in a decentralized and organic way as opposed to the mechanical and centralized command center. In fact, female leaders positively contribute to staff satisfaction through building open communications and developing more flexible working arrangements within organizations. Additionally, the organizational strategy as a pattern to deploy companies’ capabilities and interaction with environmental components, actually specifies how organizations utilize their current knowledge to create new knowledge and ideas. Moreover, the strategic approaches encourage human capital to share their idea and develop new solutions on organizational problems. In here, female leaders employ the two strategic aspects of analysis and pro-activeness that may improve employee well-being and staff satisfaction. For example, an analysis strategy could improve employee well-being through identifying new opportunities in order to provide financial support for employees to continue their education and acquire new knowledge to make more effective decisions for organizational problems. Similarly, scholars have, such as Cohen and Sproull, indicated that the analysis strategy is highly associated with a company’s capacity to develop better solutions for organizational problems. In many ways, a proactive strategy could also increase open communications by developing interactions with both departmental units and the business environment. When adopting a pro-activeness type strategy, female leaders can improve employee well-being through keeping communications honest and open, thereby developing clear guidelines for future pathways and determine future trends in the external environment and allocate their resources accordingly. As a result, female leaders can improve employee wellbeing and staff satisfaction through taking a change-oriented leadership approach.

References

Cohen, MD & Sproull, LS 1996. Organizational Learning. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.