BUS603: Managing People

In order to test our hypotheses, we conducted a multilevel field study. Online surveys were sent to leaders as well as their followers. We assessed leaders' self-rated dispositional mindfulness on the one hand and followers' perceptions of leaders' mindfulness in communication as well as followers' self-reported satisfaction with the leader (i.e., satisfaction with the leader–follower communication and general satisfaction) on the other hand. The study had a cross-sectional design. Given this design, no causal conclusions can be drawn from our study, which has to be taken into account when interpreting the results.

Followers and their leaders were recruited from various organizations of different industries in Germany, Austria, and the German speaking part of Switzerland by using three different strategies. First, individuals from our personal and professional networks were contacted. Second, we contacted HR departments of various organizations and third, the study was advertised in social networks (mainly XING). Individuals who were interested in participating received a link to the online questionnaire in addition to instructions on how to forward a separate link to their supervisor or followers, respectively. Anonymous identification codes generated by the participants were used to match the data of leaders and followers.

A total of 351 participants (147 leaders and 204 followers) completed the questionnaires. Out of the 204 followers, 141 could be matched to 77 leaders. For 43 leaders, we received responses from one follower only; for 34 leaders, we received responses from more than one follower (ranging from two to six followers, M = 2.88, SD = 1.17). Since we were interested in a general assessment of leaders by their followers, independent of specific biases of single followers, we used only those leaders for our final analysis, for which we had responses of multiple followers (i.e., at least two followers). Thus, the final sample consisted of 98 followers nested in 34 leaders.

In our final sample, 50% of the participants were female, the average age was 37.21 years (SD = 9.86), and 64% of the participants had a university degree. The sample consisted of individuals from Germany (64%), Austria (28%), Switzerland (5%), and other nationalities (3%). The participants' average tenure in the organizations was 7.93 years (SD = 7.52), their average weekly working hours were 42.91 h (SD = 10.33). Followers' average tenure with their leaders was 3.18 years (SD = 3.18), the average interaction frequency between leaders and followers was 11.05 h (SD = 11.78) per week. Because we were interested in leaders' mindfulness, we also assessed if they practiced mindfulness meditation in their daily lives: 10 of the 34 leaders of our final sample reported practicing some form of mindfulness meditation. However, we did not assess the amount or the specific nature of the mindfulness practice since this was beyond the scope of the present study.