Absent leadership : an empirical study examining the effect of laissez-faire leadership in an Australian regional university setting

![CDATA[Effective leadership is vital in facilitating the social and corporate goals of any workplace, and the higher education sector (HES) is no exception. Leadership within the HES has been shown to have positive effects upon employee wellbeing. Such research focused on transformational, distributed, servant and authentic leadership approaches that are considered to have a positive effect on employee wellbeing. There is little if any research in the Australian HES context that has examined the effect laissez-faire-leadership may have on social and/or corporate outcomes. This paper reports on a research project of 280 employees in an Australian regional university setting that investigated the effect of leadership approaches, including laissez-faire leadership, on employee wellbeing. Findings revealed that laissez-faire leadership had a significant negative impact on employee wellbeing.]]