All you need is love: the relationship between agape and work outcomes

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper was to lay the necessary conceptual and empirical groundwork of agape in organizations. Specifically, the authors reviewed literature on agape; advanced formal definition of agape; explained the relationship of agape with related variables; developed a scale to measure agape and provided evidence of its reliability and construct validity; showed how agape uniquely predicted employee outcomes beyond transformational leadership; and showed how agape compensated for the lack of transformational leadership.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a survey with 214 working executives who rated their manager on transformational leadership and agape behaviours, and later indicated their own work attitudes. Next, the authors conducted a 20-min between-subjects vignette experiment with 147 business management students who were provided with a description of a supervisor and asked to indicate their work attitudes under the supervisor.

Findings

The authors advanced an operational definition and a scale to measure agape. The findings of this study indicated that agape was a unidimensional construct with high reliability. It had significant positive relationships with followers’ job satisfaction, faith and loyalty, team commitment, satisfaction and risk-taking; explained incremental variance in employee outcomes beyond transformational leadership; and compensated for the lack of transformational leadership.

Research limitations/implications

The present research has the potential to inform recruitment, selection, training, promotion and performance evaluation decisions in organizations.

Originality/value

The authors responded to calls for developing a clear and consistent conceptualization and operationalization of agape for improving scholarly research and leadership training and development.

Citation

Carvalho, F.K. and Mulla, Z.R. (2023), "All you need is love: the relationship between agape and work outcomes", International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 1061-1080. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-04-2021-2713