TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Transformational leadership in Turkish Textile Company

Executive Summary

As part of an integrative model of leadership, transformational leadership style of superiors is proposed to be related to the strength of subordinate empowerment and team effectiveness. Findings suggest that transformational leadership contributes to the prediction of subordinates' self-reported empowerment and that the more a team's members experience team empowerment, the more effective the team will be.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary2

Section 14

Transformational leadership4

Introduction4

Objective4

Purpose5

Leadership5

Style of Leadership required for Modern Organisation5

Literature Review7

Components of model7

Outcomes of Transformational Leadership in individual and organisation8

Strengths of Transformational Leadership9

Weaknesses of Transformational Leadership14

Applying Transformational Leadership15

Critics16

Conclusion17

Section 219

Analyzing Transformational leadership Turkish Textile Company19

Critics21

Conclusion25

Section 327

Personal Reflections27

Assessing27

Analyzing28

Planning29

Development Plan33

Conclusion34

Bibliography37

Appendices46

Section 1

Transformational leadership

Introduction

Previous research on Bass's (1985) theory of transformational leadership has primarily focused on comparing the effects of transformational and transactional leadership on individual performance, satisfaction and effectiveness. Studies in this genre of leadership have shown that transformational leadership is positively related to employee satisfaction and to those in-role behaviors which constitute job performance (Bass and Avolio, 1993). Transformational leadership has also been linked to outcomes such as leadership effectiveness, innovativeness, quality improvement, and both subjective and objective ratings of performance (Bass, 1995). In the same studies, transactional leadership was also positively correlated with these outcomes, but, in general, the relationships were considerably weaker than those found for transformational leadership.

Objective

A total of 152 employees from Turkish Textile Company rated their superiors' transformational leadership behaviors and also how much they felt empowered. They also evaluated their teams' effectiveness in terms of innovativeness, communication and team performance.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate transformational leadership in relation to empowerment and team effectiveness.

Leadership

The concept of leadership has drawn heightened attention from social scientists for many decades. Recently, the focus of leadership has shifted from traditional or transactional models of leadership to a new genre of leadership theories, with an emphasis on transformational leadership (Bass, 1985), which has been termed as visionary (Westley and Mintzberg, 1989), charismatic (Conger, 1989), or new leadership (Bryman, 1992).

Style of Leadership required for Modern Organisation

The absence of research on the effect of the external environment on the emergence of transformational leadership “is typical of organizational behavior research, which, for the most part, draws an artificial boundary between organization and environment, thereby failing to consider that organizational behavior might be as much a product of the forces outside of an organization as it is a product of the organization itself” (Dietz et al., 2003: 318). Some researchers, however, have advocated the inclusion of environmental antecedents in the study of organizational behavior (i.e. DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). This is particularly important in today's competitive environment where external constituencies pressure companies for financial performance and social responsibility. Bennis and O'Toole (2000) have identified hypercompetition, Internet era volatility, turboglobalism, and billion-dollar mergers as factors leading to the diminishing half-life of executive tenure. The authors have also attributed CEO's churning (CEO's excessive turnover) to shareholders' impatience, especially for financial results. In addition to shareholders, other constituencies such as customers and the public demand ...