Leadership Fit and Job Satisfaction among Swedish Generation Z workers. A quantitative study of the association of fit between preferred and experienced leadership and job satisfaction among Swedish Generation Z employees.

Sammanfattning

As Generation Z enters the labour market, employers face growing concerns over lower job satisfaction, reduced engagement and rising turnover intentions in this cohort. Existing research has identified leadership as an important predictor of job satisfaction, while also showing that Generation Z employees hold relatively distinct leadership preferences compared to older generations. Research also identifies differences in terms of workplace expectations between Generation Z and previous generations. Less attention, however, has been paid to the alignment between the leadership Generation Z employees prefer and the leadership they experience. This study examines whether such alignment is associated with job satisfaction among Swedish Generation Z workers. Drawing on Person-Environment Fit theory and the Full Range Leadership Model, the study uses a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 108 employed Swedish Generation Z respondents. Leadership fit was operationalised in two complementary ways: perceived fit, in which respondents directly rated the match between their preferred and experienced leadership style, and subjective fit, constructed indirectly by comparing separate ratings of preferred and experienced leadership. Both operationalisations indicated a significant positive relationship between leadership fit and job satisfaction. Perceived fit explained 34.8% of the variance in job satisfaction, while subjective fit produced a smaller but statistically significant difference between fit and misfit groups. The findings extend leadership-fit logic to employee-supervisor contexts in an early-career workforce and suggest that part of the lower job satisfaction documented among Generation Z may reflect a structural mismatch between leadership preferences and leadership received, rather than a generational attitude problem alone.