Leader Change Engagement as a Boost for Workplace Development
Leader Perceptions from a Finnish Wellbeing Services County
Abstract
In 2023, Finland implemented a major structural reform that created Wellbeing Services Counties (WSCs), which became responsible for organising public healthcare, social welfare, and rescue services. This reform transferred these responsibilities from individual municipalities to newly established regional authorities, with the aim of improving service coordination, accessibility, and equality across the country. This research focused on one mid-sized WSC. The research examined how change engagement and its dimensions were reflected in WSC leaders’ and supervisors’ descriptions of their leadership work. The data for this study comprised leaders’ and supervisors’ (N=92) answers to open-ended questions in an online survey. The data were analysed with a theory-driven qualitative content analysis. The research contributes new insights into leaders’ change engagement and conceptualises it as a means of supporting both leadership engagement and well-being at work. In times when leaders report decreasing motivation and intentions of resignation it is more important than ever to find new ways of supporting enthusiasm and ensuring that public leadership work remains attractive. Job demands and resources theory (JD-R) provided us with a basis for analysing the leaders’ work from the perspective of change engagement. The research showed that leader change engagement could be an important concept for understanding change as a resource in the leaders’ work and well-being. Furthermore, it provides a new way of perceiving the connection between leaders’ work and their well-being.
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