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

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.