Richard Branson's Leadership

Richard Branson's Leadership

Branson's leadership style

Loyalty goes one step beyond trust in one's leader because it comprises supportive behavior. Followers' loyalty is a consequence of a leadership style that fosters followers' identification with, and solidarity to the leader. Empirical evidence suggests that followers' loyalty toward their leader is a strong and positive predictor of in-role as well as extra-role performance, above and beyond the impact of related constructs (e.g., organizational commitment; Chen et al., 2002). Hence, due to their enormous importance for a leader's success, we focus on followers' trust and loyalty in our investigation of the “beauty is beastly” effect. Transformational Leadership Style Beyond gender and attractiveness stereotypes, leadership style plays a crucial role for the evaluation of female leaders (Early & Carli, 2003a; Eagly et al., 2003; Johnson, Murphy, Zewdie, & Reichard, 2008). In particular, transformational leadership style has been discussed as a moderator of gender-stereotypical devaluations of female as compared to male leaders due to its assumed consistency with the female gender role ( Eagly, 2003; Yoder, 2001).

Different Leadership Styles

Transformational leadership has been contrasted with transactional leadership, which is characterized by a strong focus on task completion and respective rewards or punishments (i.e., contingent reward, management by exception active and passive). In contrast to transactional leaders, transformational leaders inspire their followers to reach goals beyond those originally expected of them. Therefore, a transformational leadership style exerts positive influence on manifold organizational outcome variables ( Judge & Piccolo, 2004) like job satisfaction ( Podsakoff et al., 1996), commitment ( Arnold, Barling, & Kelloway, 2001), work engagement ( Zhu, Avolio, & Walumbwa, 2009), individual performance ( Gooty, Gavin, Johnson, Frazier, & Snow, 2009), team performance ( Schaubroeck, Lam, & Cha, 2007), and organizational performance ( Peus, Kerschreiter, Frey, & Traut-Mattausch, 2010). Transformational leadership is currently the most dominant approach in leadership literature ( Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Judge, Woolf, Hurst, & Livingston, 2006). As compared to earlier research on democratic versus autocratic or participative versus directive leadership that was popular prior to 1990, this contemporary string of research provides more exhaustive descriptions of leader behavior ( Eagly et al., 2003), and thereby contributes to an in-depth understanding of leadership and its impact on gender-specific leader evaluations. Moreover, the question has been posed whether displaying a transformational leadership style is a viable solution to overcome the double bind that women in leadership positions are faced with ( Eagly, 2003).

Transformational leadership stimulates an idealistic, optimistic outlook on the future, communicates high expectations, focuses followers' attention on an abstract, long-term vision, facilitates change, and encourages new ways of working ( Bass, 1985; Bass & Avolio, 1995; House, 1977; Yukl, 1998). Thus, transformational leadership encourages followers to carry out and construe their work in terms of strategic means stressing ideals, optimism, positive expectations, change, eagerness, and an abstract long-term plan. Indeed, these transformational behaviors fit promotion-focused individuals' directedness at an ideal self ( Higgins, 1997), their preference for optimism and positive expectations ( Higgins et al., 2001), their preference for focusing on a ...