ORGANIZATIONAL LEADER

Organizational Leader



Organizational Leader

Introduction

Future organizational leaders are leaders that emerge within by themselves. The main consideration behind achieving up to this level is experience. Experience is one of the key attribute, which clearly reflects the leadership in any individual in an organization.

The title of Bass's (1985) seminal book on transformational leadership, Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations, has garnered much attention over the past quarter century. In his book, Bass contrasts transactional or exchange-based forms of leadership, in which leaders clarify expectations and reward followers for fulfilling them, with transformational leadership, in which leaders motivate their followers to move beyond self-interest and work for the collective good (Avolio & Yammarino, 2002; Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978). Using examples like Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy, Bass proposed that transformational leaders increase followers' confidence and the intrinsic value of performance, resulting in higher levels of motivation (Seibert, Wang, & Courtright, in press). Thus, while transactional leadership may lead to expected performance, transformational leadership has the potential to result in performance beyond expectations. As our understanding of different types and levels of performance has become more precise (e.g., Borman & Motowidlo, 1993; Klein, Dansereau, & Hall, 1994; Organ, 1988; Yammarino, Dionne, Chun, & Dansereau, 2005), a growing body of research has investigated the range of potential performance implications of transformational leadership. However, despite the abundance of primary studies linking transformational leadership and performance, the current transformational leadership literature does not provide a clear understanding of the generalizability of the “beyond expectation” role of transformational leadership in performance across criterion types and levels of analysis. Meta-analysis can be used to estimate the true magnitude of the role of transformational leadership in performance and its generalization across studies in several ways.

First, at the most basic level, meta-analysis allows us to estimate the more precise magnitude of the relationship between transformational leadership and follower individual performance than any of the primary studies included in the meta-analysis. While theory suggests that transformational leadership is associated with higher levels of performance from followers, prior meta-analyses have provided limited information about the size of this relationship. Indeed, among the five meta-analyses conducted on transformational leadership only DeGroot, Kiker, and Cross (2000) attempted to estimate the relationship of the charismatic component of transformational leadership with follower individual performance.

Thus, the first purpose of this discussion is to provide a more precise estimate of the relationship between transformational leadership and follower individual performance and to examine the generalization of this relationship across settings.

Second, the exact meaning of performance beyond expectations was not clearly specified. On one hand, transformational leadership may motivate followers to work harder, exerting more effort than would be expected from transactional leadership and resulting in higher levels of task performance. On the other hand, Podsakoff, MacKenzie, and Bommer (1996) have proposed that transformational leadership motivates followers to go beyond the minimum requirements of their job descriptions, resulting in higher levels of contextual performance.

Finally, the focus of transformational leaders on challenging the status quo suggests that performance ...