The Value of Employee Trust During Turbulent Times: Exploring Vigilant Leadership Communication and Employee Psychological Well-Being

ABSTRACT

Vigilant leadership communication has emerged as an important strategy to help organizations navigate unexpected change or turbulent times, such as recently experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vigilant leadership communication is marked by a leader’s preventative focused communication, encouragement of diverse ideas across the organization, alertness to unexpected setbacks, and vigilance for latent opportunities within an organization. This study builds theoretically upon vigilant leadership communication by further conceptualizing potential impacts on employee outcomes, specifically employee psychological well-being. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of trust by proposing a theoretical model in which vigilant leadership communication’s impact on employee’s psychological well-being is fully mediated by employee perceptions of organizational trust and leader trust. Results suggest that effective vigilant leadership communication cannot be successful in a vacuum and that the trust employees have for both the leader and the organization will mediate the relationship between vigilant leadership communication and employee psychological well-being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ A total of 537 data were collected. Responses that were all straight lining answers or completed in less than three minutes were deemed as unqualified and were removed from the dataset.