The role of daily leadership in promoting playful work design : enhancing employee flourishing and performance

Bakker, Arnold B. (author), Caracuzzo, Emanuela (author), Breevaart, Kimberley (author), Urbini, Flavio (author), Callea, Antonino (author)

This study uses leadership and proactive motivation theories to argue that on days when leaders engage in transformational or ebullient leadership behaviors, they encourage followers to playfully redesign their work tasks – i.e., take personal initiative to make work more fun and more challenging. While transformational leaders inspire confidence in employees’ capabilities through vision, personal attention, and intellectual stimulation (fostering ‘can do’ and ‘reason to’ proactive motivation), ebullient leaders foster a positive workplace by using humor, organizing fun activities, and seizing opportunities to enhance enjoyment (fostering the ‘energized to’ state of proactive motivation). We hypothesize that both leadership behaviors are related to follower flourishing and task performance through follower playful work design. A total of 147 employees completed at least three out of five daily questionnaires (response = 75.78 %; n = 689). Multilevel modeling analyses largely supported our hypotheses. When leaders demonstrated transformational or ebullient behaviors, employees were more likely to engage in playful work design, which subsequently boosted their flourishing and task performance. These effects remained consistent after accounting for previous-day levels of employee playful work design and work outcomes, underscoring the robustness of the results. We discuss how these findings contribute to the leadership and proactive motivation literatures by showing how leaders encourage their followers to proactively and playfully lead themselves. In addition, we elaborate on the practical implications for leadership training and development.

• Language: English
• Keywords: entrepreneurship, work performance, knowledge transfer, ebullient leadership, flourishing, playful work design, task performance, transformational leadership
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: EF - School of Economics and Business
• Publication status: In print
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2025
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-179908
• UDC: 331.108
• ISSN on article: 0263-2373
• DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2025.10.009
• COBISS.SI-ID: 261257219
• Publication date in RUL: 26.02.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: European management journal
• Shortened title: Eur. manage. j.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 0263-2373
• COBISS.SI-ID: 25432320

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: podjetništvo, vodenje, delovni učinek, prenos znanja