Transformational leadership,job satisfaction,and team performance: A multilevel mediation model of trust

In spite of calls for deliberate differentiation between individual and team levels of analysis, leadership research based on well-grounded theory referring to multiple levels is scarce. We seek to fill this gap by analyzing the relations between transformational leadership, trust in supervisor and team, job satisfaction, and team performance via multilevel analysis. Results are based on a sample of 360 employees from 39 academic teams. Transformational leadership was positively related to followers' job satisfaction at individual as well as team levels of analysis and to objective team performance. The relation between individual perceptions of supervisors' transformational leadership and job satisfaction was mediated by trust in the supervisor as well as trust in the team. Yet, trust in the team did not mediate the relationship between team perceptions of supervisors' transformational leadership and team performance. Implications for theory and research of leadership at multiple levels as well as for practice are discussed.     

Self–other agreement in empowering leadership: Relationships with leader effectiveness and subordinates' job satisfaction and turnover intention

We investigated the effect of self–other agreement in empowering leadership on leader effectiveness, job satisfaction, and turnover intention using a sample of 50 Norwegian municipal leaders (46 for leader effectiveness) and 168 (158) of their subordinates. The findings indicated that considering both self and subordinate ratings of empowering leadership was useful in predicting the outcome variables. In particular, subordinates of over-estimators reported lower job satisfaction and higher turnover intention. Moreover, leaders who underestimated their leadership were perceived as more effective by their superiors. For agreement (i.e., leader's self-ratings were in agreement with subordinates' ratings) the relationship between empowering leadership and leader effectiveness was curvilinear with an inverted U shape. Agreement in ratings of empowering leadership was not found to be related to subordinates' job satisfaction and turnover intention. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Empowering leadership: An examination of mediating mechanisms within a hierarchical structure

Drawing from recent theory and research on empowerment and resistance, data on leader behaviors and follower responses were collected from superior–subordinate dyads in 179 public high schools. Structural equation modeling revealed that empowering leadership was associated with higher employee performance and satisfaction, as well as reduced dysfunctional resistance. Also, employee dysfunctional resistance partially mediated the relationship of empowering leadership with (a) employee performance and (b) employee satisfaction. These results are interpreted as supportive of a perspective that endorses the utility of empowering leadership at the dyadic level within a hierarchical power structure.     

Is leadership a part of me? A leader identity approach to understanding the motivation to lead

Drawing on social comparison and identity literature, we suggest that individuals' comparisons of themselves to their own standards of leadership relate to their leadership motivation. We propose and test a model of motivation to lead (MTL) based on two types of self-to-leader comparisons: self-to-exemplar and self-to-prototype comparisons with respect to affiliation. In our main study, using data from a sample of 180 executives, we apply structural equation models to test our predictions. We find that self-comparisons with concrete, influential leaders of the past or present (self-to-exemplar comparisons) relate positively to MTL. We also find that self-comparisons with more general representations of leaders (self-to-prototype comparisons in affiliation) relate to MTL. Whereas the effect of self-to-exemplar comparisons is mediated through individuals' leadership self-efficacy perceptions, the effect of self-to-prototype comparisons is not. We replicate these findings in three follow-up studies using different research designs. We derive implications for theory and practice.     

Servant leaders inspire servant followers: Antecedents and outcomes for employees and the organization

Despite widespread adoption of servant leadership, we are only beginning to understand its true utility across multiple organizational levels. Our purpose was to test the relationship between personality, servant leadership, and critical follower and organizational outcomes. Using a social influence framework, we proposed that leader agreeableness and extraversion affect follower perceptions of servant leadership. In turn, servant leaders ignite a cycle of service by role-modeling servant behavior that is then mirrored through coworker helping behavior and high-quality customer service, as well as reciprocated through decreased withdrawal. Using a multilevel, multi-source model, we surveyed 224 stores of a U.S. retail organization, including 425 followers, 110 store managers, and 40 regional managers. Leader agreeableness was positively and extraversion was negatively related to servant leadership, which was associated with decreased follower turnover intentions and disengagement. At the group-level, service climate mediated the effects of servant leadership on follower turnover intentions, helping and sales behavior.     

Empowering Leadership,Psychological Empowerment and Employee Outcomes: Testing a Multi‐level Mediating Model

This study examined the effects of empowering leadership on employees in a customer service organization, using data from 266 employees and their supervisors from 41 work teams in a division of a large Hong Kong telecommunications corporation. Empowering leadership had acceptable levels of within‐group agreement and between‐group variability, providing support for its analysis as a group‐level construct. Testing a multi‐level model in which psychological empowerment was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between both within‐group and between‐group empowering leadership and individual outcomes, empowering leadership was associated with psychological empowerment at both levels. There was evidence of significant mediation effects at both the individual and group levels. These findings underline the importance of analysing both within‐group and between‐group differences in empowering leadership and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviours.     

Empowering leadership and contextual ambidexterity – The mediating role of committed leadership for continuous improvement

Organisations nowadays try to be ambidextrous, that is, to balance exploitation and exploration, at the level of the organisational unit, or even at the individual level. Recent studies found that important drivers for contextual ambidexterity are a high level of empowerment and an orientation towards continuous improvement (CI) and innovation. It is, therefore, to be expected that empowering leadership and leader commitment to CI are associated with contextual ambidexterity. However, literature about the relationships between empowering leadership, committed leadership for CI and contextual ambidexterity is scant. Based on two separate survey studies, we validated both the relationship between empowering leadership and contextual ambidexterity, and the mediating effect of committed leadership for CI in the organisational unit level and the individual level. The managerial implications of this research is that organisations that want to facilitate contextual ambidexterity should not only empower employees so that they can decide more independently on how to organise their time and make choices when they conduct exploratory activities and when they perform exploitative activities. Management must also act as committed ambassadors for CI, as CI functions as an integration mechanism to create both alignment and adaptability, and hence contextual ambidexterity.     

Work motivations as antecedents and outcomes of leadership: Integrating self-determination theory and the full range leadership theory

While some research has documented links between supervisors’ leadership style and subordinates’ motivation, little is known about what drives leadership behaviors in the first place. This study aimed to contribute to the scholarly literature on motivational antecedents of leadership by drawing on the self-determination theory (SDT) of motivation and the full range leadership theory. We traced work motivation throughout the leadership process, starting with supervisors’ work motivations as potential antecedents of leadership styles and proceeding to how leadership styles associate with subordinates’ work motivations. A 2-2-1 multilevel mediational model tested on 61 supervisors and their 244 subordinates showed that supervisors’ autonomous work motivation was linked with subordinates’ ratings of supervisors’ transformational leadership which, in turn, was linked with subordinates’ autonomous work motivation. Furthermore, supervisors’ transactional leadership mediated the association between their controlled motivation and their subordinates’ controlled motivation, whereas supervisors’ passive-avoidant leadership mediated the link between their amotivation and their subordinates’ amotivation. Our integration of the full spectrum of SDT’s conceptualization of motivation with the full range of leadership theory provides insights into the motivational processes that naturally direct supervisors toward transformational, transactional, or passive-avoidant leadership styles and their consequent reflection in subordinates’ motivations. The work has both theoretical and practical implications.     

Does self-efficacy matter for burnout and sickness absenteeism? The mediating role of demands and resources at the individual and team levels

In team-based organizations, team members may share similar experiences, feelings and, consequently, susceptibility to burnout. This study explores the burnout process beyond the individual level of analysis and integrates Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) with the Job Demands-Resources Model (JD-R), emphasizing the role of self-efficacy in shaping the meaning that people ascribe to situations. A multilevel structural equation model was tested in which it was predicted that work self-efficacy beliefs would be associated with burnout both directly and indirectly via job demands and job resources, and at both the individual and the team level. Moreover, it was posited that, at the team level, registered sickness absences are predicted by burnout. A sample of 5406 call centre operators, clustered in 186 teams working in the same large Italian company, filled out a questionnaire, whereas team absence rates were provided by the company's HR department. The findings largely supported the hypothesized model: at both levels, job demands and job resources partially mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and burnout. Moreover, at the team level, burnout predicted subsequent sickness absenteeism. In addition, individual-level burnout was primarily associated with job demands, whereas team-level burnout was primarily associated with a lack of team-level resources.     

Achieving leadership and success: A 28-year follow-up of college women leaders

Using a life span perspective focusing on establishing early leader identity, we examine the relationship of achievement orientations, career aspirations, personal and organizational factors, and family choices of 101 women college leaders surveyed in 1985 to ascendance into senior leadership roles and occupational success 28 years later. College-age orientations toward leadership and competition best predicted later-life outcomes. Higher college-age leadership orientation differentiated between women subsequently achieving senior leadership positions and those who did not. Networking and family support positively related to career outcomes; women with and without children had similar outcomes. Women who took leaves beyond a standard maternity absence reported similar career satisfaction to those continuously employed but were less likely to reach senior leadership positions and paid a significant economic penalty in salary. College-age achievement orientations, including leadership orientation, significantly predicted adult achievement orientations, suggesting the college years as an important period for leadership development and intervention.     

A review of the effectiveness of empowering leadership

Based on a review of empirical literature on empowering leadership, given incongruent and mixed results, the current work suggests reconsidering the effectiveness of empowering leadership. We propose a framework for examining the effectiveness of empowering leadership that considers: 1) feasibility of non-linear main effects of empowering leadership on work-related outcomes, 2) possibility of reverse causation between empowering leadership and work-related outcomes, 3) potential contradictory mediating mechanisms through which empowering leadership influences work-related outcomes, 4) consideration of boundary conditions which could alter the relationships between empowering leadership and work-related outcomes, and 5) consideration of levels-of-analysis and multilevel issues in empowering leadership. Our framework considers the multifaceted nature of empowering leadership and offers a guiding tool for advancing future research in this area.     

Core self-evaluations mediate the association between leaders' facial appearance and their professional success: Adults' and children's perceptions

Although the link between facial appearance and success is well established, the mechanisms responsible for this association have remained elusive. Evolutionary theory suggests that perceived leadership characteristics should be important for men's self-concept. Drawing on implicit leadership theory and evolutionary perspectives, we therefore examined the associations between first impressions based on facial appearance, core self-evaluations (CSEs), leadership role occupancy, and career success among a sample of working men. In Study 1, we found that CSEs mediated the relationship between individuals' facial appearance and measures of their success as leaders. In Study 2, we replicated these results using children's ratings of facial appearance, thus suggesting that basic properties of the targets' faces communicated their leadership ability more than the perceivers' life experience or acquired knowledge. These results suggest that people may use facial appearance as a diagnostic tool to determine the leadership ability of others.     

How Leaders Affect Followers’ Work Engagement and Performance: Integrating Leader−Member Exchange and Crossover Theory

Drawing on leader?member exchange and crossover theory, this study examines how leaders’ work engagement can spread to followers, highlighting the role of leader?member exchange as an underlying explanatory process. Specifically, we investigate if leaders who are highly engaged in their work have better relationships with their followers, which in turn can explain elevated employee engagement. For this purpose, we surveyed 511 employees nested in 88 teams and their team leaders in a large service organization. Employees and supervisors provided data in this multi‐source design. Furthermore, we asked the employees to report their annual performance assessment. We tested our model using multilevel path analyses in Mplus. As hypothesized, leaders’ work engagement enhanced leader?member exchange quality, which in turn boosted employee engagement (mediation model). Moreover, employee engagement was positively linked to performance and negatively linked to turnover intentions. As such, our multilevel field study connects the dots between work engagement research and the leadership literature. We identify leaders’ work engagement as a key to positive leader?follower relationships and a means for promoting employee engagement and performance. Promoting work engagement at the managerial level may be a fruitful starting point for fostering an organizational culture of engagement.     

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.     

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining Turnover Intentions with Organizational Identification and Job Satisfaction*

The social identity approach is a powerful theoretical framework for the understanding of individuals' behaviour. The main argument is that individuals think and act on behalf of the group they belong to because this group membership adds to their social identity, which partly determines one's self‐esteem. In the organizational world, social identity and self‐categorization theories state that a strong organizational identification is associated with low turnover intentions. Because identification is the more general perception of shared fate between employee and organization, we propose that the relationship between identification and turnover will be mediated by job satisfaction as the more specific evaluation of one's task and working conditions. In four samples we found organizational identification feeding into job satisfaction, which in turn predicts turnover intentions.     

Leader–member exchange (LMX) in context: How LMX differentiation and LMX relational separation attenuate LMX's influence on OCB and turnover intention

Using the group engagement model, we hypothesize that two differentiated leadership constructs – LMX differentiation at the group level and a new construct, LMX relational separation, at the individual-within-group level – interact with LMX to affect follower citizenship behaviors (OCB) and turnover intentions. Data from 223 followers and their leaders situated across 60 workgroups demonstrate that the effects of individual perceived LMX quality are contingent upon a group's overall variability in LMX (i.e., LMX differentiation) and employees' similarity in terms of LMX with their coworkers (i.e., LMX relational separation). Specifically, the effects of high quality LMX relationships on OCB and turnover intentions are weaker when group LMX differentiation or employees' LMX relational separation is higher, rather than lower. Our findings contribute to a growing stream of multilevel LMX research incorporating climate effects and offer an alternative view of differentiated leadership in groups. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

The servant leadership advantage: When perceiving low differentiation in leader-member relationship quality influences team cohesion,team task performance and service OCB

How does servant leaders' unique ability to place each follower's needs above their own influence relationships between followers and impact their collective performance? In a study that integrates principles of servant leadership with the social comparison theoretical framework, we tested a group-level model to examine how servant leadership induces low perceived differentiation in leader-member relationship quality (perceived LMX differentiation) within a group, which strengthens team cohesion and in turn positively influences team task performance and service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (service OCB). Our sample comprised 229 employees nested in 67 work teams. Structural equation modeling results indicate that servant leadership significantly predicts low perceived LMX differentiation; perceived LMX differentiation is strongly related to team cohesion such that the lower the perceived differentiation, the stronger the team's cohesiveness. And, team cohesion is also strongly related to both the team's task performance and service OCB. Perceived LMX differentiation and team cohesion mediate the effect of servant leadership on both team task performance and service OCB.     

Do “protean” employees make better leaders? The answer is in the eye of the beholder

While the protean career (Hall, 1976, 2002) has been lauded for its advantages in helping individuals adapt to changing career contexts, it is not clear how this career orientation may impact how others perceive a person's leadership ability. In this study, we hypothesized that those with a protean career orientation would receive higher leadership ratings from subordinates and superiors, but lower leadership ratings from peers, in part based upon social comparison theory. Using structural equation modeling, our hypotheses regarding subordinates and peers were supported, but not with respect to superiors, who, along with peers, rated those with a protean career orientation lower in terms of transformational leadership as measured by the MLQ. We discuss potential reasons for these findings and the consequences for research and theory. Also, we examine the implications of this research for leadership development, workforce recruitment and retention, and possible generational significance.     

Ethical leadership and group in-role performance: The mediating roles of group conscientiousness and group voice

In this paper, we propose that ethical leadership will lead to higher group in-role performance. Building from and integrating several different research streams, we argue that two key mechanisms for this effect are group conscientiousness (an emergent state) and group voice (a group process). We collected survey data at three points in time from 80 groups of nurses and the groups' leaders. The results provide support for all of our hypotheses. There was a positive relationship between employee ratings of ethical leadership (Time 1) and leader ratings of group in-role performance (Time 3). Group conscientiousness and group voice (Time 2) both partially mediated this relationship. These results contribute to our understanding of leadership and group effectiveness not only by showing that ethical leadership has a positive influence on group in-role performance, but also by identifying specific norms and group-level behaviors that help to account for this relationship.