Visionary leadership: Development dialogues that increase value congruence, vision valence, and employee engagement

Engaged employees are a central part of a well-functioning public organization. When leaders practice visionary leadership, they can support value congruence, vision valence, and employee engagement. However, it can be challenging to implement this form of leadership, and the literature does not provide many suggestions on how to approach visionary leadership in practice. This article unfolds how goal-oriented development dialogues can serve as a framework for exercising visionary leadership and offers a practical model for conducting such dialogues. The article is based on a 15-month field experiment involving 226 Danish leaders and 4,442 job center employees. The empirical findings show that goal-oriented development dialogues increase the alignment between employees’ personal values and the organization’s values, and that the dialogues enhance employees’ vision valence and work engagement. The findings also demonstrate that leadership training programs designed with a combination of classroom-based training, action learning elements, and digital leadership tools can promote leaders’ adoption of these development dialogues.