Visionary leadership and leaders’ burnout: a weekly diary analysis

Abstract

Much has been written about the benefits of visionary leadership behaviors to the followers as well as leaders themselves. Given this prevalence, however, visionary leadership may carry some unnoticed harms. Based on the conservation of resources theory, we argue that visionary leadership behaviors can exhaust a leader’s own resources and result in burnout. To test this hypothesis, we adopted weekly diary analysis and conducted two experience sampling studies through weekly surveys with each study lasts for five consecutive weeks. The results show that visionary leadership behavior is associated with psychological stress, and a resulting increase in burnout, among leaders. These detrimental outcomes extend beyond the advantages to followers (Study 1) and the leaders themselves (Study 2). The extent to which visionary leadership behavior is associated with increased psychological stress also depends on the characteristics of the followers. Specifically, when followers have low degrees of proactive personality (Study 1) or competence (Study 2), visionary leadership has stronger effects on psychological distress. Overall, the results elucidate when and why visionary leaders are likely to experience burnout.