Description
Gauge of employee satisfaction with leadership.
Formula
Survey results.
Interpretation
Employee Satisfaction with Leadership represents a survey index or set of questions for employees to express their satisfaction with the organisation’s leadership. Such a measure or index may be titled differently, depending on the survey used.
While the Manager Quality Index measure relates to employees’ opinions of their direct managers, Employee Satisfaction with Leadership looks more broadly at employees’ opinions about the leadership of their business line, function and area, as well as the leadership of the organisation as a whole.
The opinions solicited from relevant survey questions typically relate to leaders’ competencies and skills (e.g. communication, subject mastery, employee development, personality, decision making), their ability to inspire confidence and trust and motivate performance, and the appropriateness of the business strategy being pursued.
Such opinions have an impact on the employment brand, the offer fit to employees and employees’ commitment to the organisation. These factors in turn influence productivity, morale and turnover, representing potentially significant organisational gains or losses.
Data Sourcing
Organisations typically source data for this measure from the responses to one or more questions from employee surveys.
Analysis
Organisations should analyse this measure in aggregate, as well as by the individual leadership characteristics assessed by the survey questions. Organisations can also analyse the measure by employee characteristics to determine how employees’ satisfaction with leadership differs among various populations.
Such dimensions could include performance rating, pay grade, tenure, age, employment level, gender, ethnic background, occupation, job family and job function.
Limitations
As with all survey-related metrics, the value provided by this measure depends heavily on the effectiveness of survey design and delivery in accurately reporting employees’ opinions.
Additionally, all survey measures represent employee perceptions at a point in time and can reflect temporal events (e.g. termination of a senior official for fraud).
Satisfaction with leadership is one aspect of the employee’s relationship with and opinions about the organisation. Commitment, engagement and other factors are also important in understanding employees’ relationship with their employer.
Targets
Targets for this measure will depend on the scale used for the index or survey question responses. Targets based on benchmark groups will only apply if other organisations use sufficiently comparable survey questions and survey methodology.
Organisations would aim for as high a level of employee satisfaction with leadership as is reasonably achievable given the organisational context.