An organization may have a strong wellbeing program. It may offer employees psychological support, flexible benefits, sports facilities or stress management training. But if the employee’s daily experience includes excessive workload, an expectation of constant availability, uncertainty or an unsupportive manager, the effect of these investments may remain limited.
Because employee wellbeing is shaped not only by the programs an organization offers but also by how work is managed every day. This is where the concept of healthy leadership comes in.
What Is Healthy Leadership?
Healthy leadership is when a manager manages working conditions, relationships and work processes with employees’ physical and psychological health in mind. It would be incomplete to see the concept only as being a “good,” empathetic or understanding manager.
Healthy leadership also requires the manager to:
- manage workload realistically
- provide employees with an appropriate level of autonomy
- clarify tasks and expectations
- strengthen social support
- notice psychosocial risks
- create a safe team environment where employees can speak up when needed
EU-OSHA (the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work) also stresses that leadership commitment, clear policies and clear roles are necessary for psychosocial risks to be managed effectively.
How Does Leadership Affect Employee Health?
A manager’s behavior can directly affect not only an employee’s motivation, but also their job demands and job resources.
1. Workload and Priorities
In a team where every request is “urgent,” giving employees stress management training may not solve the underlying problem. Healthy leadership means being able to set priorities, taking capacity into account and not normalizing an unsustainable workload.
2. Autonomy and Control
Having a degree of control over how they do their work is an important job resource for employees. Micromanagement can narrow this space and increase the psychological burden of the work.
3. Psychological Safety
An employee thinks about how people will react when they make a mistake, raise a problem or say “I can’t keep up with this workload.” Healthy leadership supports team environments in which people do not feel they must constantly stay silent.
What Does the Research Say?
The relationship between leadership and employee health is not merely a theoretical assumption.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Pletzer, Breevaart and Bakker examines how constructive and destructive leadership relate to employees’ work engagement and burnout within the job demands–resources (JD-R) model. However, most of the studies the research draws on are cross-sectional.
Another meta-analysis focusing only on longitudinal studies covers 104 studies and 30,314 employees. According to this analysis, destructive leadership is associated over time with negative effects on job satisfaction, commitment and various behavioral outcomes. The same analysis also shows that the relationship may not be one-directional: for some outcomes, employees’ negative behavior is also associated with destructive leadership over time.
So although strong relationships are observed, it would not be right to claim direct causation for every leadership behavior. This scientific caution matters for organizational practice.
A Manager Is Not a Therapist
One of the most common mistakes in healthy leadership is to give managers a role as if they were fully responsible for employees’ mental health.
The World Health Organization recommends that managers receive training to support employee mental health. But it also draws a clear line: the manager’s job is not to diagnose or treat mental disorders.
The manager’s job is to notice change, listen, make whatever adjustments are possible to working conditions and, when needed, refer the employee to appropriate professional support.
Healthy Leadership Is Not Just a Training
Giving a manager healthy leadership training while asking them to work with unrealistic targets, chronic understaffing and an expectation of constant availability is not sustainable.
Because managers are also part of the organizational system and are exposed to the same psychosocial risks. Their own workload and wellbeing directly affect their leadership practices.
So healthy leadership is not limited to the question “How does our manager treat employees?” A stronger question is this:
“Does our organization create the conditions that allow managers to manage both performance and human health in a sustainable way?”
This is exactly where healthy leadership truly begins.
