Empowering leadership fostering work-related flow: A win-win for work-life balance and innovation in flexible workplaces

Working from home using IT to connect and communicate with peers (telework) is reported to have both positive and negative outcomes for employees and organizations. On the one hand, for example, telework may affect employees’ work-home balance, depending on the degree of flexibility, autonomy and responsibility employees are given by their managers. On the other hand, employees may experience social isolation, particularly when leadership is not geared at paying attention to employees' needs, potentially also affecting their energy needed for workplace innovation. To foster positive outcomes in telework contexts, empowering leadership that can energize people when working at a distance can be expected to play an important role, as the energy that employees gain from this leadership style can both foster higher levels of work innovation and can spill-over to the home domain leading to a better work-life balance. What can we then learn from experiences gained during the Covid-pandemic on the role of leadership in telework contexts in employees' psychological processes and outcomes? Building on the mutual gain perspective in HRM (Peccei & Van De Voorde, 2019) and the spill-over mechanism presented in the work-home balance literature, we aim to contribute to the debate on leadership in the context of telework by analyzing to what extent empowering and directive leadership relate to employees’ work-home balance and innovative work-behavior simultanesously via work-related flow. We expect empowering leadership (T=1) to have a positive enduring relationship with both employees’ work-home balance and innovative work-behavior (T=3) via work-related flow (T=2). In contrast, we expect that directive leadership (T=1) has a negative enduring relationship with both employees’ work-home balance and innovative work-behavior (T=3) via work-related flow (T=2). These hypotheses are tested employing PLS-SEM on a longitudinal (three wave) sample of 250 employees who had to telework from home (substantially) due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data was collected in Spring/Summer 2020, Autumn 2020, and Winter 2020/2021. We conclude by discussing the results and their implications for future research and (hybrid) management practice.