Podium Presentation - 20 minutes International Positive Psychology Association 8th IPPA World Congress 2023

PERMA-Lead: A Behavioral Leadership Approach to Positive Leadership. (#216)

Markus Ebner 1
  1. University Vienna, Vienna, VIENNA, Austria

Background

Both organization-oriented [1,3] and personality-oriented models [7,8,9] have become well known for Positive Leadership in recent decades.

Aims

Therefore, based on the PERMA model [2,10,11], we developed a leadership model that defines concrete leadership behavior that has a positive impact on employees' PERMA experience at work.

Method

A questionnaire was developed and normed using two samples of managers (n1=287, n2=758). Us a confirmatory factor analysis, 138  items were reduced to 15 items, and the result showed satisfactory quality criteria [5].

In a first study, the influence of PERMA-Lead on the burnout risk of employees in hospitals was surveyed. For this purpose, employees (n= 198) evaluated their managers using the PERMA-Lead model. Additionally, the employees' burnout risk was measured [6].

A second study examined whether this leadership style in grocery stores has an impact on customers' shopping behavior. More than 13,000 individual purchases in 20 food stores were evaluated for this purpose [4].

In a recent and not yet published third study, the question of what role the gender of the manager plays in Positive Leadership was investigated. To this end, leaders (n=280) self-assessed with the PERMA-Lead Profiler and were additionally external assessed by their employees (n=1918).

Results

The result of study show that the burnout risk among those employees whose manager leads according to the PERMA-Lead principle has an average 2 ½ times lower burnout risk than those whose manager does not lead according to this principle.

In study 2 it was shown that customers buy significantly more if the store management is assessed by the employees with a higher average PERMA-Lead value.

The result of study 3 shows that men and women rate themselves equally in terms of their Positive Leadership behavior. However, female leaders are rated significantly better by employees.

Conclusion

PERMA-Lead as a behavioral approach to Positive Leadership complements previous models and demonstrates its relevance for practice in organizational psychology.

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