Leadership and Wellbeing at Work: insights from Malta

What role does the leader play in strengthening a healthy, resilient and innovative organisation?

Within the WOW Leadership project, we look at the role of leadership in organisations in the broadest sense of the word: as a key to wellbeing at work, aimed at enabling employees, teams and organisations to flourish. From our themes WOW leadership, innovative capacity and lifelong learning, one thing is clear: Paying attention to the wellbeing of leaders strengthens the foundation for a healthy workplace. A healthy leader creates a healthy organisation, and vice versa.

Last week, the Hanze WOW Leadership Team went on a research trip to Malta. There, they engaged in conversations with a wide range of organisations, including local companies from various sectors, employee organisations, universities and government institutions. Through interviews and a dialogue session, they explored how organisations work on wellbeing at work: what works, where opportunities lie and how leadership can make the difference.

Key insights from Malta:

• Improving wellbeing at work requires thorough preparation, support and continuous learning from both the leader and the employees.
• Enhancing wellbeing at work goes beyond providing direction as a leader: it calls for active involvement in implementation and engagement with the people doing the work: practice what you preach.
• It is important that wellbeing at work delivers at least a return on investment, or preferably, demonstrably improves organisational performance.
• A leader who pays attention to their own wellbeing at work and that of their employees has a direct influence on organisational connectedness, and thereby on the organisation’s resilience.

Notably, wellbeing at work is not an isolated HR topic; it relates to behaviour, culture and the way work and the physical workplace are organised. This is precisely where you see what leadership means in practice for wellbeing at work: everyday choices directly influence how people experience their work.

Our ambition

The results of this trip, together with the exploratory research carried out in Singapore at the end of 2025,form the first step toward building a European platform and network for entrepreneurs, governments and researchers. The platform focuses on leaders and aims to contribute to healthy, innovative, productive and future-proof rural regions such as the Northern Netherlands. The Hanze WOW Leadership Team will continue its research in other European regions and, of course, also in the Netherlands, in order to further shape the European network. Several international visits will follow in the coming period to further develop this network.

This project is an integrated collaboration between the research groups Leadership & Sustainable Employment led by Klaske Veth, Regional Innovative Capacity led by Mira Bloemen-Bekx and Labour Market Transitions led by Arjen Edzes. The WOW Leadership team further consists of Roland Klarenbeek, Jeannet Davids, Cécile Oosting, Eva Hansen and Roos Fopma.