The impact of leadership styles on academicians’ and leaders’ burnout in private universities: The moderating role of work stress management

Abstract

This study examined the impact of leadership styles on academicians’ and leaders’ burnout in private universities. It also attempted to identify the moderating role of work stress management on the relationship. More specifically, it aimed to identify the impact of transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and servant leadership on academicians’ and leaders’ burnout in Jordanian private universities. Then, it examined the word stress management factor as a moderator to identify whether this factor strengthens or weakens the relationship.  In order to attain these goals, the researcher embraced the use of SPSS and AMOS software to analyze the data. The results indicated that leadership styles play important role towards burnout among academicians and academic leaders. To be more precise, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and servant leadership directly and indirectly influence burnout. Also, the work stress management plays a moderating role in this relationship. Therefore, one can state that transformational and servant leadership helps to decrease burnout and burnout through motivation and encouragement people, whereas transactional leadership can lead to psychological burnout due to the emphasis on rules and incentives without referring to feelings. The poll also discovered that the work stress management indicators such as equal distribution of duties, proper handling of disagreements, and mental health support have a depressive impact on the work stress related to the emotional exhaustion and consequently on the workplace output and well being of the staff.