CHARACTERIZING BENEVOLENT LEADERSHIP IN CONTEXTS OF SPATIAL MOBILITY AND HYBRID DE-SPATIALIZATION OF WORKPLACES

Abstract

Benevolent leadership is an established concept in leadership research. Although its characteristics have been extensively studied in face-to-face settings, the prevalence of hybrid work in organizations calls its validity into question. In this paper, we investigate how benevolent leadership is characterized by employees in contexts of spatial mobility and the hybrid de-spatialization of workplaces. We interviewed forty employees from five consulting firms operating in France, Canada, and the United States. Within this sample, the findings showed that benevolent leadership incorporates characteristics pertaining to five paradigms. In line with Karakas and Sarigollu’s (2012) theory of benevolent leadership, we found that it was underpinned by moral, spiritual, vitality, and community-related characteristics, as well as being inferred through characteristics linked to technology and geography within a mobility paradigm. The items of this theory’s measurement scale were subsequently revised and expanded. These items were reviewed by nineteen human resources experts using the card-sorting method, producing a recommended hypothetical factor structure consisting of twenty-seven items, which could then be further tested through factorial analyses.