The impact of Leadership Preferences and Personality Traits on Employees’ Motivation

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to make workers more uncompromising with respect to issues such as quality of workplace relations and work life balance. Hence, motivation and leadership style assume a key relevance for keeping the workforce engaged. Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between leadership style and motivation, by leveraging on the possible contribution of personality traits. We hypothesize that individuals may exhibit different preferences for motivational drivers and for leadership style, and that these two sets of preferences might be correlated with each other and with personality traits. Our results suggest that there exists a relationship between preferences for leadership style and motivational drivers. Furthermore, one of these relationships appears to be critically mediated by specific personality traits.