Illegitimate tasks in the public sector—associations with work engagement, stress, and turnover intention: the moderating role of leadership

What the paper says

Illegitimate tasks are responsibilities that fall outside the accepted scope of an employee’s role and have been shown to negatively impact employee well-being, especially in the public sector. Despite repeated calls for multilevel models to explore whether the negative effects of illegitimate tasks can be mitigated by leadership behaviour, research remains limited. This study examines how the two dimensions of illegitimate tasks, unnecessary and unreasonable tasks, are associated with work engagement, stress, and turnover intention employing multilevel analysis while exploring the moderating role of transformational leadership. Using questionnaires and register data from a Swedish municipality, the study included 1721 employees. The findings indicate that more unnecessary and unreasonable tasks decrease work engagement, increase stress levels, and make it more likely that employees intend to leave their jobs. Moreover, aggregated at the workgroup level, transformational leadership moderates the relationship between unreasonable tasks and turnover intention. Specifically, higher levels of transformational leadership reduce the negative effects of unreasonable tasks on turnover intention. A similar trend is observed for the relationship between unnecessary tasks and stress, where transformational leadership marginally buffers this association. The findings in the study suggest that organisations should prioritise enhancing task alignment to minimise the prevalence of illegitimate tasks. However, as eliminating such tasks entirely may be challenging, fostering transformational leadership behaviours could help mitigate their negative impact, particularly on turnover intention.