Developing Sustainable Workplaces with Leadership: Feedback about Organizational Working Conditions to Support Leaders in Health-Promoting Behavior

Organizations should support leaders in promoting their employees’ health in every possible way to achieve a sustainable workplace. A good way to support leaders could include getting feedback about their health-promoting behavior from their employees. The present study introduces an instrument (Health-Promoting Leadership Conditions; HPLC) that enables the provision of feedback about the leaders’ efforts to create health-promoting working conditions in seven key aspects: health awareness, workload, control, reward, community, fairness and value-fit. The instrument was used in employee surveys and in an online study, obtaining a sample of 430 participants. The results showed that all seven key aspects of health-promoting leadership can be assigned to a main factor of health-promoting leadership. In addition, the HPLC shows high construct validity with dimensions of stress, resources and burnout (Recovery-StressQuestionnaire for Work [RESTQ-Work] and Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey [MBI-GS]). The results indicate that the HPLC can be used as a basis on which to assess health-promoting leadership behavior with a focus on changing working conditions. By getting feedback about their leadership behavior from their employees, leaders can identify their potential and fields for improvement for supporting their employees’ health and developing a sustainable workplace.