The Impact of Leadership Strategies on Workplace Happiness and Organisational Performance: An Applied Study of Employees in a Dubai-based Healthcare-related Organisation

Abstract

The importance of workplace happiness is strategic as employee well-being could influence performance, commitment and organisational stability. Yet, there is a lack of evidence to shed light on employees’ experiences of happiness programs led by their leaders in the Gulf healthcare-related organisations. The relationships between leadership strategies, workplace happiness, organisational performance, and employee loyalty in one healthcare-related organisation in Dubai were explored in this study. A sequential exploratory mixed-methods design was used to collect data from 10 purposively sampled employees through semi-structured interviews, and from 149 valid responses from a survey. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interview data, and SPSS and partial least squares structural equation modelling were used to analyse the survey data. Five themes were found that highlighted leadership support, multidimensional well-being, performance, loyalty and implementation quality as interrelated dimensions of workplace happiness. Leadership strategies were positively associated with workplace happiness, which was positively correlated with organisational performance and employee loyalty. However, the loyalty relationship needs to be treated with caution due to construct reliability and discriminant validity issues. The integrated findings suggest that material security and recognition, flexibility and organisational care are all aspects of effective leadership support. Communication, fairness, accessibility and departmental relevance also condition programme outcomes. The findings offer context-specific, noncausal evidence to help design credible workplace-happiness strategies.