Leadership Styles and Burnout in SMEs: Employees' Perceptions and Organizational Implications

Abstract

Leadership is currently understood as a form of influence within interpersonal relationships, playing a crucial role in organizational functioning and employee well-being. This article reports an exploratory, qualitative-led mixed-methods study of employees' perceptions of the relationship between leadership styles and burnout in Portuguese micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), a context still little explored in the national literature. A questionnaire survey based on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and the Maslach Burnout Inventory provided descriptive, contextualizing data, while semi-structured interviews, analysed through thematic content analysis, constituted the primary source of evidence. The final sample comprised forty-five employees from six Portuguese SMEs, twenty-eight of whom answered the questionnaire and seventeen took part in the interviews; given its small, non-probabilistic size, the sample does not support statistical generalization or formal hypothesis testing. The findings suggest that, in employees' perception, organizational leadership style is associated with the emergence of burnout. Transformational leadership was the most frequently perceived style, present in all companies studied, but its apparent effectiveness depends on being balanced with other styles: laissez-faire leadership was most often associated with reduced personal and professional accomplishment, while transactional leadership, when resting on excessive pressure to meet goals, was associated with higher emotional exhaustion. Transformational leadership itself, when unbalanced and unsupported, may paradoxically accompany burnout. Emotional exhaustion emerged as the dimension most frequently reported. Rather than confirmatory conclusions, these exploratory findings are offered as propositions for future research with larger, representative samples and inferential statistical methods, and suggest that promoting balanced leadership styles may help reduce burnout risk and foster healthier SME work environments.