The topic of absentee leadership rarely comes up in today’s leadership or business literature, but research shows it’s alarmingly common, says Scott Gregory in an article for Harvard Business Review.
Having a boss who lets you do as you please may sound ideal, especially if you’re being bullied and micromanaged by your current boss. However, a 2015 survey of 1,000 working adults showed that eight of the top nine complaints about leaders concerned behaviors that were about what their bosses did not do.
Clearly, this means that, from the employee’s perspective, absentee leadership is a significant problem — and it’s even more troublesome than other, more overt forms of bad leadership.
In fact, research shows that being ignored by one’s boss is more alienating than being treated poorly. The effects of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlast the effects of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months.
In contrast, the effects of absentee leadership take longer to appear, but they degrade subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years. These effects are also related to a number of other negative outcomes for employees, like role ambiguity and increased bullying from team members. Absentee leadership creates employee stress, which can lead to poor employee health and talent drain, which then affect an organization’s bottom line.
If your organization is one of the few with effective selection and promotion methods in place, then it may be able to identify effective and destructive leaders. Even if your organization isn’t great at talent identification, both types of leaders are easy to spot once they are on the job. They produce predictable organizational outcomes: Constructive leadership creates high engagement and productivity, while destructive leadership kills engagement and productivity.
Chances are good, however, that your organization is unaware of its absentee leaders because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative effect on employee morale may be slowly harming the company.
If you want your organization to thrive, take steps to avoid being psychologically absent from your employees. Putting your focus on meaningful involvement with them could be the difference between success or failure.