Positive Leadership: Its Nature , Antecedents and Consequences

Purpose: The field of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) experiences recently a dynamic growth. Many conceptual frameworks are created and empirically tested. Recently the model of positive orientation with positive leadership as one of its dimensions has been conceptualized and operationalized. The purpose of the paper is to measure the influence of some of the antecedents on positive leadership and the impact of positive leadership on some of its consequences.Methodology/approach: Among antecedents we have chosen life orientation and resilience. Life orientation assesses individual differences in generalized optimism versus pessimism, resilience is the ability to bounce back or recover from stress. Among consequences we have chosen flourishing, satisfaction with life and subjective happiness. We test the conceptual model in the quantitative research with the use of reliability, correlation and linear regression methods.Findings: Research results show that both optimism and high resilience positively influence positive leadership which in turn impacts flourishing, satisfaction with life and subjective happiness.Implications/limitations: The results provide implications mainly for research and business practice. Implications for research include directing attention at some of the relations that have not been researched before. Research results provide practical recommendations on how to shape positive leadership and, in turn build positive outcomes in employees’ lives.Originality/value: Some of the relationships presented in the paper have not been researched yet. The main value of the paper is taking the next step in uncovering the nature, antecedents and consequences of positive style of leadership.