Leader Accessibility as a Precondition for Relational Leadership Approaches to Work: Concept and Antecedents

Studies of public leadership have documented positive effects of strong relations between leaders and employees. We argue that employee-experienced leader accessibility, defined as a leader’s availability and engagement with their employees, is an important precondition for relational leadership approaches to work. The organization of work conditions leaders’ opportunities for being accessible, but we lack basic knowledge of how antecedents such as managerial span of control, hierarchical position, and leaders’ perceptions of their working conditions matter for how accessible employees perceive leaders to be. We investigate to what extent objective and subjective organizational factors correlate with employee-experienced leader accessibility. Using multilevel data from 10 Danish public organizations with responses from 446 leaders and their 6322 employees, we find that objective factors condition how accessible leaders are perceived to be, underscoring the role of organizational design in fostering leader-employee engagement, while leaders’ perceptions of their working conditions are not related to employee-experienced leader accessibility. In this way, we provide novel and actionable insights into the antecedents of leader accessibility, which is important as we strive toward a better understanding of how contextual factors condition the relations between leaders and employees in public organizations.