Arbeit, Personal und Organisation

The rapid evolution of remote and hybrid work arrangements has fundamentally reshaped leadership dynamics, presenting novel challenges and opportunities. As "new ways of working" increasingly become the norm, their impact on our professional lives promises to be long-lasting. This study delves into several critical areas centring around good leadership practices in increasingly digitalized and virtual settings: 1) the applicability of transformational and health-oriented leadership styles in remote and hybrid settings; 2) the impact of effective leadership on employee outcomes; 3) the dependency of leadership effectiveness in remote and hybrid environments on specific working conditions; 4) the benefits that leaders derive from employing healthy leadership styles; and lastly, 5) the distinctive challenges leaders face when managing teams remotely versus in traditional office settings. Our findings are drawn from data collected from two samples throughout Germany and across all sectors. Sample 1 consisted 1318 leaders 2180 employees surveyed in April 2021, sample 2 were 907 leaders and 2124 employees surveyed in September 2022. In our discussion, we outline practical implications for leaders and HR professionals, spotlighting strategies for integrating effective leadership practices within remote and hybrid work frameworks. This study not only highlights the evolving nature of leadership in the digital age but also offers insights into fostering a productive and supportive work environment, irrespective of the physical workspace.

The rise of remote collaboration tools is transforming team collaboration. Despite its current limitations, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has the potential to overcome the challenges of traditional video calls and enhance remote meetings in the future. This study compares the effectiveness of VR and video calls (MS Teams) on team collaboration. A total of N = 90 participants were performing a problem-solving task, and N = 127 were conducting a creative task in both conditions (VR and video call). Measures of meeting evaluation, engagement, performance, and fatigue were assessed. The results reveal that video call collaboration is superior to enhancing performance. In comparison, VR offers significant benefits regarding comfort, social interaction, and engagement, particularly with creativity tasks. However, at the current stage of technical development, using VR, regardless of the task, is exhausting and causes fatigue. This research highlights the potential of VR as an effective tool for remote collaboration, emphasizing the importance of selecting the right platform based on the specific needs of the collaborative context.

High-performance work systems (HPWS) and transformational leadership (TL) are dominant fundamental explanations of organizational behavior. Although both are assumed to have a strong influence on the same employee outcomes, research has only recently began to theorize and study their simultaneous independent and joint effects. We extend this research, first, by adopting a multilevel perspective and arguing that their relative main effects differ depending on the level of analysis. Second, we develop the conceptualization of the interdependencies of leadership and human resource management (HRM) more generally, and argue for level-specific interaction effects of HPWS and TL. To test our hypotheses, we use data collected in two waves from 730 employees working in 99 teams. The results indicate that HPWS is more important for individual employee outcomes, exemplified by engagement, stress and turnover intention, while TL is more important for team functioning, exemplified by serving climate and service performance climate. We found only weak support for their interaction effects. Our study provides important theoretical and practical insights about the multilevel complementarity of the main effects of HPWS and TL, and the need to sharpen the theoretical arguments for interaction effects of leadership and HRM that have dominated past joint research on them. The sudden and extensive implementation of teleworking in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has threatened employees’ well-being. Based on the challenges that particularly threatened such well-being in the beginning of the pandemic, we identify sets of telework-specific HRM practices and leadership behaviors, and examine their joint relationships with teleworkers’ happiness well-being in terms of work engagement and job satisfaction. Thus, we also consider the mediating roles of social isolation (as an indicator of social well-being) and psychological strain (as an indicator of health well-being). We also expect that HRM and leadership should interact and reinforce each other. Our analyses are based on data from German teleworkers at two consecutive points in time. Our findings reveal differentiated and complementary effects of telework-oriented HRM and leadership. In particular, we identified the provision of health care to contribute most to telework-oriented HRM’s relationship with social isolation and happiness well-being. Telework-oriented leadership mainly affected teleworkers’ happiness well-being via strain by ensuring communication and information exchanges between teleworkers. In a critique of traditional concepts of human resource management (HRM), which are designed to enhance performance rather than well-being (i.e., high-performance work system, HPWS), scholars have proposed well-being focused HRM systems (WBHRM). However, so far it is unclear whether these WBHRM are indeed a better predictor of employee well-being than the traditional HPWS. Therefore, we tested the relationship between WBHRM and employees’ happiness and health well-being and compared its predictive power with that of the HPWS. Our analyses are based on data from 1510 employees at two consecutive survey dates. Our results show positive relationships between both HRM systems and employee well-being, as well as a significant but small advantage of WBHRM in predicting employee well-being. However, we also found shifts in the relative contribution of HRM practices between both models. This suggests that by failing to account for well-being-specific HRM practices within the HPWS, explained variance in employee well-being is misattributed to other HRM practices within the HPWS, obscuring their true relationship with employee well-being.

This paper sheds further light on the contextual boundaries in the relationship between high-performance work practices (HPWPs) and employee wellbeing. In particular, we analyze whether this relationship is moderated by health-oriented leadership behavior (i.e., staff care) which describes the extent to which leaders value, are aware of, and protect their followers' health at work. Our analyses are based on employee data (N = 1,345) from Germany, covering two points in time. Findings show positive associations between HPWPs and happiness-related (i.e., engagement, commitment) and health-related (i.e., general health, physical health complaints, mental health complaints, strain) wellbeing outcomes. The positive relationship between HPWPs and employee wellbeing is weaker the more employees experience leadership behavior in terms of staff care. Thus, our results provide further evidence for a substitutive or compensatory effect between HRM and leadership.

In dieser Arbeit soll die Ausbildung der Offiziere des Heeres und hier speziell die Offiziere der gepanzerten Kampftruppen zur Führungskraft betrachtet werden. Das Gebiet der Führungskräfteentwicklung innerhalb der Bundeswehr kann auf Grund der Komplexität und Vielfältigkeit nur schwer ganzheitlich erfasst werden. Darum beschäftigt sich diese Arbeit exemplarisch mit einem Ausschnitt. Je nach Teilstreitkraft und Truppengattung ergeben sich teilweise unterschiedliche fachliche Anforderungsprofile für die Offiziere. Folglich unterscheidet sich auch die Ausbildung zur Führungskraft bei der Marine von der der Luftwaffe oder des Heeres. Selbst innerhalb des Heeres gibt es fachliche Unterschiede. So liegen bei Offizieren der Logistiktruppe die Schwerpunkte nicht in der Schießausbildung, sondern eher in der Materiallogistik. Bei allen Teilstreitkräften und Truppengattungen ist aber die Änderung der Aufträge gleich. Die Landesverteidigung steht nicht länger im Vordergrund, sondern die friedenschaffenden bzw. friedenerhaltenden Aufgaben stehen an erster Stelle. --- Es soll betrachtet werden, welche Ansprüche der Dienstherr an seine Führungskräfte stellt und ob die Führungskräfte ihnen auch wirklich gerecht werden können. Weiterhin soll in Augenschein genommen werden, wie die jungen Führungskräfte ausgebildet und auf ihre Arbeit vorbereitet werden. Letztlich bleibt die Frage, ob sich die Führungskräfte ausreichend auf ihre Aufgaben vorbereitet fühlen. --- Ferner soll aber auch untersucht werden, ob es eine Diskrepanz zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit bei der Ausbildung der militärischen Führungskraft gibt. Die Arbeit will die Stärken und Schwächen der Ausbildung der Offiziere herausstellen und betrachten, welche Eigenschaften den aus der Bundeswehr ausscheidenden Offizier für die "freie Wirtschaft" interessant erscheinen lassen.