Participative leadership and workgroup commitment as multilevel resources for employee well‐being: A cross‐level examination

Abstract In the present paper, we argue that participative leadership may operate as a multilevel resource for employee well‐being within organizational workgroups. We suggest that individual and collective perceptions of participative leadership may function at different levels of analysis and have distinct associations with employee well‐being (i.e., job satisfaction and burnout). Moreover, drawing on conservation of resources theory and social identification theory, we posit that workgroup commitment serves as a cross‐level boundary condition for the relationship between individual perceptions of participative leadership and employee well‐being. Using time‐lagged designs across two samples (Study 1: 155 employees in 48 workgroups; Study 2: 206 employees in 54 workgroups), we find that both individual and collective perceptions of participative leadership are positively related to job satisfaction and negatively related to burnout. Cross‐level interaction analyses further reveal that workgroup commitment attenuates the individual‐level relationship between participative leadership and job satisfaction and, less consistently, burnout. These findings suggest that workgroup commitment can serve as a psychological resource at the workgroup level, reducing reliance on participative leadership and highlighting its role as a boundary condition for leadership effectiveness and employee well‐being.