An empirical study of the relations between leadership, social support networks, task autonomy and emotions in a technical work environment
Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The world in which we live is hyper-dynamic with multiple inputs, outputs and\nexpectations. As it relates to the fast pace of corporate America, customers\nwant products and services within a tighter market window, with no defects and\nfor lower costs. Stakeholders insist that managers do more with less human and financial resources yet more aggressive technological and sales\ngoals. These realities translate into a more complex work environment in that the\nemotional toll of pending economic outcomes act to motivate or paralyze the\nvery engine designed to produce the desired outcomes the employees.\nThe body of work presented in this dissertation directly addresses the empirical\nrelationship between the perceptions of the work context factors of leadership,\ntask autonomy and social support networks with respect to the positive and negative emotions of the employees of the engineering firm that participated in\nthis study. The empirical results from this research indicate that a positive and\nsignificant interrelationship does exist among the factors examined in this study.\nThe employees studied included 249 middle to upper level managers of whom\n78.7% were men and 21.3% were women. The range of years of experience for\nthe participants varied from new hire to more than 20 years. Homogeneity of\nVariance tests confirms the validity of comparative analysis for the segmented\ndata population. Multivariate statistics were used to address the four research\nquestions. The strongest correlations occurred for the subgroups of women and\nnon-managers with respect to the relationship of social support networks and\npositive emotions. Until now, there has been no empirical research linking the\nsocial support networks factor directly to emotions.
Author: Tanya Verniece Dugat Wickliff
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: ConocoPhillips
OpenAlex ID: W634376955