Leadership style in Romanian police. Implications for well-being at work

Abstract

Only a limited amount of leadership literature has discussed the impact of leadership on subordinates. An even smaller amount of studies has investigated how leadership affects the health of subordinates (Nyberg et al., 2005). This sudy aimed at describing leadership style in Romanian police elite units. LBDQ-XII (Stogdill, 1963, 1964) has a long history of use in military settings (officers), showing a good predictive validy for initiating structure and consideration (Schriesman & Kerr, 1974). 92 leaders (91 males and 1 woman, aged 25-52, age mean 37,8, 84 officers and 1 NCO) completed the questionnaire. Applying Hotteling principal component method, with Varimax rotation and Kaiser normalisation, we found three factors: organizing in uncertainty, task orientation and relationship orientation. The results confirmed „the military model myth†(Cowper, 2000), showing that police leaders are displaying many different behaviors as expected by former police leadership theories, trying to face daily mission uncertainties (Gerber & Ward, 2011). Decision authority and the support provided to subordinates and fellows are powerful predictors of future health among subordinates (Oxenstierna et al., 2004). The initiating structure behaviours of leaders are expected to be positively related to job satisfaction among subordinates (Alsubaie, 1997), since leadership dimensions explain 9% of the variance in emotional exhaustion (Stordeur et al., 2001, Langner, 2002). A leader who balances task and relationship orientation creates the lowest levels of stress or burnout among subordinates (Harris, 1999). With respect to the health and job satisfaction of subordinates, the study also addresses various health promoting factors.