Awake and Well? Sleep Leadership, Sleep Health, and Psychological Health in the Workplace

Employee sleep is important for organizations of all types: when employees sleep insufficiently or poorly, their organizations can suffer numerous consequences. Yet, we know little about the steps that organizations might take to improve employee sleep, or about the downstream effects of such steps. Integrating ideas from research on leadership, sleep, and well-being, we build theory supporting a set of leadership behaviors that could promote healthy sleep: providing active support in the sleep domain (i.e., engaging in “sleep leadership”). Recognizing the potential barriers to workplace conversations about sleep, we first examine whether leaders can actually exert a positive influence on employee sleep health over time. Finding that they can, we then turn to the potential effects of healthy employee sleep on employees’ psychological functioning in the workplace, again over time. A nine-month, three-wave study of U.S. Army soldiers suggests that leaders can impact employees’ sleep and thereby improve employees’ psychological health. A series of generalizability tests indicate that these effects are likely to extend outside the military context, and shed light on the underlying mechanisms. These findings challenge the implicit assumption that organizations and their leaders can do little within the workplace to influence employee sleep or its downstream effects.