The relationship between transformational leadership and follower sickness absence: the role of presenteeism

The impact of transformational leaders on employee health and well-being has received much attention. Less research has focused on the relationships between transformational leaders and followers’ sickness absenteeism. Transformational leaders promote a group climate that may lead to absenteeism, especially among vulnerable employees (those with high levels of presenteeism). In the present study we examined the relationships between presenteeism, group-level transformational leadership and sickness absence rates in a three-year longitudinal study of postal workers and their leaders in Denmark (N?=?155). Group-level transformational leadership in year 1 predicted sickness absenteeism in year 2, but not in year 3. In examining conditions under which transformational leadership may be linked to higher levels of sickness absenteeism, we found that presenteeism in year 1 moderated the link between transformational leadership in year 1 and sickness absenteeism in year 3, such that followers working in groups with a transformational leader and who were high in presenteeism reported higher levels of sickness absenteeism. Our results suggest a complex picture of the relationship between transformational leadership and sickness absenteeism; transformational leaders may promote self-sacrifice of vulnerable followers by leading them to go to work while ill, leading to increased risks of sickness absence in the long term.     

The Impact of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Citizenship Behaviours: The Contingent Role of Public Service Motivation

In this paper we examine whether the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs) is contingent on public service motivation (PSM). We propose that PSM may reduce the motivational influences of transformational leaders’ behaviours on followers’ OCBs in public sector organizations. Using a sample of Mexican employees we tested this proposition with structural equation modelling. Our results show that the motivational effects of transformational leadership were less for public sector followers higher in PSM than for those lower in PSM. A follow‐up study in private sector organizations did not reveal a similar interaction effect. These findings appear consistent with previous research demonstrating that PSM is more aligned to the goals and values of public rather than private sector organizations. Nevertheless, the direct effects of PSM on OCBs remained in the private sector.     

变革型领导与下属工作绩效及组织承诺:心理资本的中介作用

探讨变革型领导影响下属的深层心理作用机制,即变革型领导是否会通过下属心理资本的中介作用对下属工作绩效和组织承诺产生影响。以230位MBA学员为样本,采用结构方程模型的方法分析了变革型领导行为、下属工作绩效、组织承诺以及下属心理资本各维度间的关系。研究结果表明,下属心理资本中的自我效能、希望和恢复力对变革型领导行为与下属工作绩效的关系起到中介作用;下属心理资本中的自我效能和恢复力对变革型领导行为与下属组织承诺的关系起到中介作用。     

Impact of rater personality on transformational and transactional leadership ratings

This study addresses the role of rater personality in ratings of transformational and transactional leadership. In a naturalistic field study, we found that rater personality (i.e., agreeableness, openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness) was positively associated with ratings of transformational leadership, but significant rater personality effects were not found in an experimental study where leadership behavior was invariant. These results suggest that disagreements among raters about leaders' behaviors are not due solely to random error and may instead reflect true differences either in (a) the behaviors leaders exhibit toward individual followers or (b) personality-related differences between followers in attention to and recall of leadership behaviors. We also found that personality (of subordinates and peers) was not randomly distributed across leaders, though clustering effects were generally small. Practically, our results suggest that (a) individual reports of leadership may be better at predicting leadership outcomes than aggregated group reports – especially those related to individual attitudes and behaviors – though they are rarely used in the literature; (b) aggregation is complicated because rater personality is associated with leadership ratings and is not randomly distributed across leaders; and (c) corrections for measurement error based on inter-rater agreement may not be appropriate due to non-random unique rater variance.     

Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review

Stress has been implicated as an important determinant of leadership functioning. Conversely, the behavior of leaders has long been argued to be a major factor in determining the stress levels of followers. Yet despite the widespread acknowledgement that stress and leadership are linked, there has been no systematic attempt to organize and summarize these literatures. In the present, we meta-analytically review the relationship between three leadership constructs (transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, and abusive supervision) and stress and burnout. Our analyses confirm that leader stress influences leader behavior and that leadership behaviors and leader-follower relationships are significant determinants of stress and burnout in subordinates. We build on these results to suggest new avenues for research in this domain as well as discussing how these results can inform practice with regards to leader development.     

All I want for Christmas is recovery – changes in employee affective well-being before and after vacation

Abstract

Transformational leaders employ a visionary and creative style of leadership that inspires employees to make independent decisions and develop in their work. There is some evidence that the transformational (inspirational) leadership style is linked to employee burnout and stress. However, little research has focused on the psychological mechanisms that could explain this link, nor has there been a focus on positive affective well-being. We propose that transformational leaders influence their followers' self-efficacy, thereby affecting affective well-being in followers. This study extends previous work by examining the direct link between leadership and well-being both cross-sectionally (N=447) and longitudinally (N=188), and testing the mediating effects of self-efficacy. The study was carried out within parts of an elderly care department in a Danish local government. A theory-driven model of the relationships between leadership, self-efficacy and affective well-being was tested using Structural Equation Modelling. The results indicated that followers' self-ratings of self-efficacy mediated the relationship between transformational leadership style and positive affective well-being. Only limited evidence for a direct path between leadership behaviour and positive affective well-being was found. These findings have implications for how organizations may promote employee well-being, through interventions directed at supporting transformational leadership behaviours.     

Daily transformational leadership and employee job crafting: The role of promotion focus

Transformational leaders are expected to challenge their followers to take greater ownership of their work, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance their performance. In the present study, we hypothesize that transformational leadership is positively related to followers' job-crafting behaviour – proactive behaviour aimed at optimizing job demands and job resources. Moreover, we argue that followers' promotion focus (i.e. being driven by growth and development needs) positively moderates this relationship. Data were collected from 107 employees from Norwegian knowledge-based organizations (response?=?93.2%). Participants responded to a general questionnaire and five daily diary questionnaires (total N?=?535 occasions). The results of multilevel analyses revealed partial support for our hypotheses. Followers' day-level perception of their leader's transformational behaviour was positively related to followers' day-level job crafting in the form of increasing structural and social resources. Moreover, daily transformational leadership was particularly beneficial for job crafting when followers scored high (vs. low) on the trait promotion focus. We conclude that transformational leaders can encourage their followers' use of job crafting, and that employees' promotion focus facilitates this effect.     

Transformational leadership and childrens' aggression in team settings: A short-term longitudinal study

Social learning theory posits that one crucial way individuals learn how to behave is by observing and modeling the behavior of salient others. We conducted a short-term longitudinal study using multisource data on 183 teenaged ice hockey players (M age = 13.39 years) in 16 hockey teams to test the effects of 3 potentially salient leadership influences (team coaches, team players, and parents) on players' on-ice aggression. We tested a cross-level mediated model in which player aggression (penalty minutes) as measured by referees was the criterion variable. After controlling for prior levels of player aggression, team-level aggression mediated the relationship between team-level coach transformational leadership and player aggression. Parents' transformational leadership did not influence player aggression when assessed simultaneously with team-level coach transformational leadership. Consistent with social learning theory, the findings suggest that transformational leaders model prosocial behavior for followers.     

Strategic leadership for exploration and exploitation: The moderating role of environmental dynamism

This study advances prior theoretical research by linking transformational and transactional behaviors of strategic leaders to two critical outputs of organizational learning: exploratory and exploitative innovation. Findings indicate that transformational leadership behaviors contribute significantly to adopting generative thinking and pursuing exploratory innovation. Transactional leadership behaviors, on the other hand, facilitate improving and extending existing knowledge and are associated with exploitative innovation. In addition, we argue that environmental dynamism needs to be taken into account to fully understand the effectiveness of strategic leaders. Our study provides new insights that misfits rather than fits between leadership behaviors and innovative outcomes matter in dynamic environments. Hence, we contribute to the debate on the role of strategic leaders in managing exploration and exploitation, not only by examining how specific leadership behaviors impact innovative outcomes, but also by revealing how the impact of leadership is contingent upon dynamic environmental conditions.     

Reviewing Leadership Styles: Overlaps and the Need for a New ‘Full‐Range’ Theory

A central topic in leadership research concerns the impact of leadership style – the pattern of attitudes that leaders hold and behaviors they exhibit. Since the year 2000, several new leadership styles have been proposed to capture important missing aspects beyond the dominant charismatic/transformational and transactional framework. The authors review the emerging literature on these new styles – ideological leadership, pragmatic leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership, spiritual leadership, distributed leadership, and integrative public leadership – as well as the recent work on servant leadership. They also comment on the Ohio State studies on leadership, and then discuss the ways in which these many styles overlap with transformational leadership and each other, and issue a call to leadership researchers to collectively develop a new ‘full‐range’ model of leadership that encompasses and distills what is unique about these various styles. The authors argue that such an integrated full‐range model is necessary for research on leadership style to progress.     

Effects of leader intelligence,personality and emotional intelligence on transformational leadership and managerial performance

This study investigates the effects of intelligence, personality traits and emotional intelligence on transformational leadership and the effective performance of leaders in the organizational context. Data were collected from 134 midlevel managers from a large Brazilian company that operates in the energy sector. Our findings suggest that leadership effectiveness, as measured by the achievement of organizational outcomes, is a direct function of a leader's transformational behaviors, and is an indirect function of individual differences (experience, intelligence and conscientiousness) that work through transformational behaviors. A negative effect of neuroticism on leadership effectiveness was also observed. In addition, while emotional intelligence seemed to be statistically related to transformational leadership if considered in isolation, when ability and personality were controlled for, the effect became non-significant. We discuss implications for theory, research and practice.     

Followership,leadership and social influence

Traditional research in leadership has largely relegated followers to the role of passive recipients or, at best, moderators of leader influence and behaviors. However, recent work in the area of followership has begun shifting this focus and emphasizing the possibility that followers actively have an influence over leaders, in particular leader behavior. This paper revisits traditional areas of the leadership literature and builds on the emerging followership literature to reintroduce followers as part of the social context of leaders. In an attempt to build theoretical rationales for how followers influence leader behavior we draw on the social influence (e.g., Social Impact Theory, Latane, 1981) and the power literature to suggest individual (e.g., strength and immediacy of followers) and group level (e.g., number of followers and unity of the group) characteristics that influence leader behaviors as a function of a leader's informational and effect dependence on followers.     

Does valuing androgyny and femininity lead to a female advantage? The relationship between gender-role,transformational leadership and identification

The notion of ‘think manager–think male’ has been demonstrated in many studies. The current study examines whether leaders are perceived as more effective when they have ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or ‘androgynous’ characteristics, and how this relates to the leader's and followers' sex. Using carefully matched samples of 930 employees of 76 bank managers, we studied the relationship between managers' gender-role identity (perceived ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘androgyny’) and how this relates to leadership effectiveness in terms of transformational leadership and personal identification with the leader. Our findings show that among both male and female leaders, ‘androgyny’ was more strongly related to transformational leadership and followers' identification than ‘non-androgyny’, and that leaders' ‘femininity’ was more strongly related to leadership effectiveness than ‘masculinity’. Furthermore, the results show that women paid a higher penalty for not being perceived as ‘androgynous’ (mixing ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’), in comparison to men with regard to personal identification. When examining same- versus cross-sex relationships, we found that ‘non-androgynous’ male managers were rated higher by their male employees than by their female employees. Our findings suggest that women and men who are interested in being perceived as effective leaders may be well advised to blend ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviors, and even more so when they are in situations of non-congruency (i.e., women in leadership roles and leading in cross-sex relationships). We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.     

Task complexity and transformational leadership: The mediating role of leaders' state core self-evaluations

While substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the beneficial consequences of transformational leadership and the conditions in which this leadership style is most effective, there is a remarkable shortage of research on the contextual antecedents of transformational leadership behavior itself. To address this gap, a laboratory experiment was conducted in which we tested the relationship between task complexity and the emergence of transformational leadership behavior. In this experiment, 111 participants were divided in groups of three (comprising one leader and two subordinates), and were instructed to solve three decision-making tasks with varying levels of task complexity. Results indicated that task complexity was negatively related to transformational leadership behavior, and that this relationship was partially mediated by the leader's state core self-evaluations. In other words, when leaders encounter tasks that are overwhelmingly complex, they act in less transformational ways because they momentarily lack the psychological resources to do so. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.     

To whom does transformational leadership matter more? An examination of neurotic and introverted followers and their organizational citizenship behavior

Despite the massive amount of transformational leadership research, the role of followers has not been well-examined in the transformational leadership literature. To understand how leader–follower interactions influence follower organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), we examined the cross-level interactions between transformational leadership and two follower personality traits (neuroticism and extraversion). Using a sample of 215 leaders and 1284 followers, results showed that follower neuroticism moderated the relationships between transformational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior directed toward other individuals (OCB-I) and toward the organization (OCB-O), such that relationships were stronger for those high in neuroticism. Further, follower extraversion moderated the relationships between transformational leadership and OCB-I and OCB-O, such that relationships were stronger for those low in extraversion. Therefore, the inspirational and developmental nature of transformational leaders can offset follower neuroticism and introversion and guide these employees to perform more OCB despite their tendencies to worry, lack confidence, and be shy and withdrawn.     

Revisiting followership through a social identity perspective: The role of collective follower emotion and action

We review the concept of followership, with a specific focus on how followers actively influence leadership outcomes. We examine in particular research from four key areas: social identity perspectives on leadership, intergroup emotion theory, collective action, and reciprocal affect within leader–follower interactions. Our central proposition is that followers engage in actions, driven by both cognitive and affective-based processes, which affect leadership outcomes. Moreover, because leaders are part of the groups they lead and therefore embedded within the social context of a group, we propose that any action that affirms or threatens the salient group will trigger both cognitive and emotional responses from followers towards leaders. These include the extent to which a leader engages in actions that are perceived as (1) self-sacrificial, (2) procedurally fair, and (3) expressing emotions congruent with that of their group. We also propose that the extent to which followers translate their perceptions and emotions towards collective action towards their leaders will be moderated by individual-level group identification and group-level shared identity. To conclude, we highlight theoretical implications in light of these propositions and suggest areas for further research on followership.     

How transformational leadership works during team interactions: A behavioral process analysis

Transformational leadership is generally considered helpful for team functioning. However, the social dynamics underlying the benefits of transformational leadership remain elusive to date. To understand how and why transformational leadership can foster team functioning, this study focuses on leader–follower communication dynamics during team interactions. From the perspective of leadership as social problem solving, we argue that transformational leadership is linked to functional team problem-solving processes because transformational leaders use solution-focused communication (mediator model). In a sample of 30 videotaped problem-solving team meetings from two organizations, we coded transformational leadership style and the verbal behavioral interactions of leaders and team members over the course of their entire meetings (30,128 behavioral units in total). Multilevel results showed that transformational leadership was positively linked to functional problem-solving communication by team members. This positive relationship was mediated by leaders' solution-focused communication. Moreover, at the micro-level of conversational dynamics within the meeting process, lag sequential analysis revealed that leaders' ideas and solutions triggered subsequent solution statements by team members and inhibited counterproductive communication by team members, such as running off topic, criticizing, or complaining. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications for conceptualizing dynamic leader–follower processes as well as managerial implications for leading effective meetings in organizations.     

Does shared and differentiated transformational leadership predict followers' working conditions and well-being?

Transformational leadership has been widely researched and is associated with followers' performance, attitudes, and subjective well-being at the individual level. Less research has focused on transformational leadership as a group phenomenon. In a survey study (425 followers and 56 leaders), we examined how group-level and differentiated transformational leadership shape followers' perceptions of their working conditions and individual subjective well-being. There was stronger evidence that differentiated transformational leadership's relationships with indicators of well-being was mediated by perceptions of working conditions, in that 10 out of 20 tests for mediation using differentiated transformational leadership were significant, compared to just three out of 20 for group-level transformational leadership. The results suggest that transformational leadership needs to be studied as a group phenomenon considering how group-level perceptions may impact on followers' well-being and that leaders need to realize that there is an “I” in groups and addition to a “we” in groups.     

Leading well is a matter of resources: Leader vigour and peer support augments the relationship between transformational leadership and burnout

ABSTRACT

Although studies suggest that transformational leaders play an important role in employee health and well-being, the relationship between transformational leadership and employee burnout remains unclear. One reason may be that moderators may play an important role. Building on conservation of resources theory, we examined if leaders’ perceptions of internal and external resources in terms of vigour and peer support augmented the relationship between transformational leadership and employee burnout in a sample of municipality workers and their leaders in Sweden (N?=?217). Multilevel analyses over two time points revealed that both vigour and peer support enhance this relationship, such that when leaders experience high levels of vigour or peer support, the negative relationship between transformational leadership behaviours and employee burnout was strengthened. Our findings suggest that both personal and contextual resources may help leaders to better engage in transformational leadership, which is important in order to protect employees from burning out.     

The nature of followership: Evolutionary analysis and review

From an evolutionary perspective, followership is puzzling because it is not clear why individuals would relinquish their autonomy and set aside their personal goals to follow those of another individual, the leader. This paper analyzes followership from an evolutionary perspective and advances three main conclusions that are not yet part of the leadership literature. First, followership evolved as a strategy to solve a range of cooperation and coordination problems in groups (e.g., collective movement, peacekeeping). Second, individuals who lack the physical, psychological, or social capital to be leaders themselves are more likely to emerge as followers. Third, followership styles, behaviors, and engagement result from (a) variations in the relative pay-offs that accrue to followers vis-à-vis their leader, (b) the adaptive goals pursued by followers, (c) the adaptive challenges that select for different followership styles, and (d) the prevailing leadership style. Together, these conclusions have several implications for followership theory, research, and practice.