On the perceived effectiveness of transformational–transactional leadership: The role of encouraged strategies and followers' regulatory focus

The present research sought to examine when and why transformational and transactional leadership are perceived by followers to be effective. A series of five studies revealed that perceived effectiveness of transformational and transactional leadership is influenced by the fit between leadership style‐driven encouraged strategies and followers' preferred strategies. Specifically, we found that transformational leadership primarily encourages promotion‐focused strategies and, accordingly, creates a regulatory fit for promotion‐focused followers. In contrast, transactional leadership primarily encourages prevention‐focused strategies, creating a regulatory fit for prevention‐focused followers. As a consequence of this regulatory fit, leadership is perceived as more effective and predictive of enhanced effort. By integrating literature on self‐regulation with insights from leadership research, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the leadership process and of interpersonal influences on self‐regulatory experiences. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A focus on commitment: the roles of transformational and transactional leadership and self-regulatory focus in fostering organizational and safety commitment

The concept of employees’ commitment is one of the most challenging concepts in the management, organizational behaviour and human resource management literatures and research. The current study focuses on the construct of commitment as an emotional attitude, and expands the concept of general organizational commitment to a new more specific form of commitment, commitment to safety. Furthermore, commitment theorists commonly identify leadership as an important contributing factor to the development of organizational commitment. We aim to explain an underlying motivational mechanism, self-regulatory foci, through which leadership styles foster followers’ commitment. Results of three studies that used different methods (field and experimental), within different samples, demonstrated that transformational leadership was positively associated with followers’ promotion focus, which in turn was positively associated with both followers’ general and affective commitment to safety. Prevention focus mediated the positive relationship between a transactional active leadership style and both followers’ general and continuance commitment to safety. The implications of the findings for theory and practice are further discussed.     

Transformational and Transactional Leadership and Followers’ Achievement Goals

Purpose

Achievement goals, or the standards of competence employees pursue in their work, have far-reaching consequences for employee and organizational functioning. In the current research, we investigated whether employees’ achievement goals can be predicted from their supervisor’s leadership style.

Design/Methodology/Approach

A multilevel study was conducted in which followers of 120 organizational leaders completed measures of their leader’s transformational leadership (focusing on individual needs and abilities, on intellectual development, and on a common team mission), transactional leadership (focusing on monitoring and achievement-related rewards), and their own mastery goals (aimed at learning, developing, and mastering job-relevant skills), and performance goals (aimed at doing better than others).

Findings

Group-level transformational leadership predicted followers’ mastery goals, whereas group-level transactional leadership predicted followers’ performance goals. Within-group differences in transformational leadership also predicted mastery goals.

Implications

These findings suggest that leadership style plays an important role in the achievement goals followers adopt. Organizations may promote transactional leadership in contexts requiring that employees outperform others. In contrast, in contexts requiring learning and development, organizations may promote transformational leadership.

Originality/Value

This research is the first to examine the relationships between leadership styles and specific follower goals, and the first to highlight the role of leadership as a social variable involved in employees’ adoption of achievement goals.     

变革型领导与交易型领导的权变分析

变革型领导与交易型领导是当前领导研究的热点。一般认为,变革型领导是比交易型领导更为有效的领导方式。然而从权变的观点出发,变革型领导与交易型领导的有效性还要受到情境因素、被领导者因素的影响。该文分析了替代领导、领导与下属的关系以及组织文化对变革型领导和交易型领导与领导效能关系的调节作用,并讨论了今后的领导行为研究中应该注意的问题。     

Within‐person Relationship between Creative Self‐efficacy and Individual Creativity: The Mediator of Creative Process Engagement and the Moderator of Regulatory Focus

Integrating the dynamic self‐regulatory framework with the motivational self‐regulation perspective, we theorize and test how and when creative self‐efficacy increases individual creativity at the within‐person level. Conceptualizing creative process engagement as a self‐regulation effort, we theorize that creative process engagement mediates the within‐person effect of creative self‐efficacy on individual creativity. We further explore how creative self‐efficacy and chronic regulatory focus interact to affect the within‐person mediating effect. A sample of 145 R&D workers provided two monthly reports for their creative activities and experiences over 8 months. The findings provide empirical support for the hypothesized mediating mechanism. At the within‐person level, creative process engagement mediates the relationship between creative self‐efficacy and individual creativity. The results also show that chronic regulatory focus moderated the mediated relationship. Specifically, creative self‐efficacy is positively related to individual creativity for employees with a strong prevention focus and negatively related to individual creativity for employees with a strong promotion focus.     

Core Job Characteristic and Uncertainty Avoidance: Into the Black Box of Transformational Leadership Effect on Creativity

Drawing upon the job characteristic model and the “management of meaning” perspective, this study examines the process and conditions through which transformational leadership fosters employee creativity. Our results reveal that the effect of transformational leadership on creativity is mediated by employees’ perceptions of core job characteristics (variety, identity, significance, autonomy, feedback). This mediation effect is further moderated by employees’ uncertainty avoidance orientation. Specifically, transformational leaders foster creativity through followers’ perceptions of core job characteristics only among employees low on uncertainty avoidance. The association between enhanced job characteristics and creativity is more positive for employees with low uncertainty avoidance orientation than those with high uncertainty avoidance orientation. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Leadership predictors of innovation and task performance: Subordinates' self‐esteem and self‐presentation as moderators

This study examined self‐related subordinate variables as moderators of relationships between supervisors' leadership behaviours (transformational as well as active‐corrective transactional leadership) and subordinates' innovative behaviour and task performance. Based on behavioural plasticity and self‐monitoring theory, we hypothesized that these associations would be moderated by subordinates' organization‐based self‐esteem and by their propensity to modify self‐presentation, a major facet of the self‐monitoring construct. Field survey data (N=161) collected in research and development, marketing and human resources departments of several German companies revealed that transformational leadership positively predicted both criteria, whereas active‐corrective transactional leadership negatively predicted innovation. As hypothesized, transformational leadership related more strongly and positively to innovation for subordinates low in organization‐based self‐esteem. When subordinates were low in self‐presentation propensity, active‐corrective transactional leadership was negatively, and transformational leadership was positively associated with task performance.     

Leadership,creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the most comprehensive meta-analytic examination of the relationship between leadership and both followers’ creative and innovative performance. Specifically, we examined 13 leadership variables (transformational, transactional, ethical, humble, leader-member exchange, benevolent, authoritarian, entrepreneurial, authentic, servant, empowering, supportive, and destructive) using data from 266 studies. In addition to providing robustly estimated correlations, we explore two theoretically and pragmatically important issues: the relative importance of the different leadership constructs and moderators of the relationship between leadership and employee creativity and innovation. Regrading creative performance, authentic, empowering, and entrepreneurial leadership demonstrated the strongest relationships. For innovative performance, both transactional (contingent reward) and supportive leadership appear particularly relevant. The current study synthesizes an important, burgeoning, diverse body of research, and in doing so, generates nuanced evidence that can be used to guide theoretical advancements, improved research designs, and up-to-date policy recommendations regarding leading for creativity, and innovation.     

Linking job control to employee creativity: The roles of creative self‐efficacy and regulatory focus

Providing job control to employees has been used to improve employee creativity in many organizations. However, the underlying psychological mechanism between job control and employee creativity has not been sufficiently examined. Whether the mechanism is consistent among different individuals rarely has been studied. Drawing on social cognitive theory and regulatory focus theory, we propose a moderated mediation model to investigate the relationship between job control and employee creativity as well as the mechanism and boundary condition of this relationship. We test our model using survey data from 182 supervisor–subordinate dyads collected from China. The results reveal that job control is positively related to employee creativity via creative self‐efficacy. A promotion focus moderates the indirect effect of job control on employee creativity via creative self‐efficacy such that the positive relationship between job control and creative self‐efficacy is stronger among high promotion focus employees, but a prevention focus does not moderate the relationship. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in this study.     

Follower moral reasoning influences perceptions of transformational leadership behavior

Transformational leadership reflects charismatic, but ethical, influence on followers. However, leadership ultimately occurs through the perceptual and attribution processes within followers. Accordingly, the perception and evaluation of transformational leadership is likely to be influenced by followers' moral reasoning, which is the ability that allows individuals to identify and interpret ethically‐salient issues in social environments. As predicted by social‐cognitive principles of self‐schemas, observers' moral reasoning positively related to the perception and positive evaluation of transformational leadership behavior, but not to positive affective reactions towards that behavior. These same relationships did not occur for the perception and evaluation of transactional leadership behavior. Implications for whistle‐blowing behavior, organizational ethics, and the measurement of transformational leadership are discussed.     

领导行为对员工创造力的影响:基于变量中心和个体中心的视角*

以10家IT企业的305名员工为被试,采用变量中心和个体中心的分析策略,考察领导行为对员工创造力的影响。变量中心的分析发现,变革领导行为和交易领导行为均显著正向预测员工创造力。个体中心的分析发现,中变革/中交易与(中、低)被动结合的领导类型最为普遍,占全部领导的69.2%;无论被动放任行为高低,高变革与高交易行为组合领导下的员工创造力最高,说明高变革和高交易领导行为的结合最有利于员工创造力,领导类型对员工创造力的影响主要由使用变革和交易这两种领导行为的程度所决定。     

绩效薪酬对员工突破性创造力和渐进性创造力的影响

研究分别从认知评价理论和习得性努力理论视角考察了绩效薪酬对员工突破性创造力和渐进性创造力的影响及其作用机制, 并检验了变革型领导和交易型领导对上述两条路径的调节效应。基于24家企业的364对上下级匹配数据的研究结果表明：绩效薪酬对内在动机和突破性创造力没有显著的影响, 对外在动机和渐进性创造力有显著的正向影响。变革型领导调节绩效薪酬与突破性创造力的关系：高变革领导情境下, 绩效薪酬通过正向影响内在动机间接对突破性创造力产生正向影响; 低变革领导情境下, 绩效薪酬通过负向影响内在动机间接对突破性创造力产生负向影响。交易型领导调节绩效薪酬与渐进性创造力的关系：交易型领导通过强化绩效薪酬对外在动机的影响进而放大了绩效薪酬对渐进性创造力的正向效应。针对上述结果, 讨论了本文的理论与实践意义。     

Different roles of shared and vertical leadership in promoting team creativity: Cultivating and synthesizing team members’ individual creativity

Drawing on the componential model of creativity (Amabile), we examined how shared leadership and a formally appointed leader's transformational leadership jointly cultivate team creativity in two studies. We conducted an experiment with a sample of 109 undergraduate students (32 teams) enrolled in a business plan competition (Study 1) and a field survey based on multisource, time-lagged data collected from 251 full-time employees working on 64 research and development teams (Study 2). The results from both studies revealed that shared leadership enhanced team members’ individual creative self-efficacy and individual creativity, which in turn improved team creativity. Moreover, the results from Study 2 showed that a formally appointed leader's use of different transformational leadership behaviors had different impacts on individual and team creativity. Individual-focused transformational leadership strengthened the positive effect of shared leadership on team members’ average individual creativity, whereas group-focused transformational leadership facilitated the translation of teams with high average individual creativity into teams with high levels of team creativity. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

On the development of regulatory focus: the role of parenting styles

The present study was designed to contribute to our understanding of the development of chronic self‐regulatory orientations reflecting self‐regulation with a promotion and prevention focus, respectively. Little research addressed this issue empirically, although regulatory focus theory (RFT) explicitly entails assumptions concerning the role of parenting styles in the development of habitual self‐regulatory orientations. According to RFT, parenting styles involving a critical and punitive mode that is focused on attaining safety and meeting obligations increases the likelihood that the child will acquire a predominantly prevention‐focused style of self‐regulation. In contrast, parenting styles involving a bolstering mode that is focused on accomplishing ideal goals and fulfilling aspirations increases the likelihood that the child will acquire a predominantly promotion‐focused style of self‐regulation. To test these assumptions, the present study assessed via self‐reports the degree to which participants experienced different parenting styles as well as their chronic self‐regulatory focus. The results reveal positive associations between the critical and punitive parenting style and prevention‐focused self‐regulation and between the bolstering parenting style and promotion‐focused self‐regulation thus corroborating the propositions of RFT. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transformational leadership,psychological empowerment,and flow at work

ABSTRACT

Frequent experiences of flow – an enjoyable state of optimal challenge – at work are associated with many positive individual and organizational outcomes. In our research, we examine how leaders affect subordinates’ flow experiences through subordinates’ work-related self-concept. Specifically, on the basis of self-concept theory, we propose that transformational leaders affect followers’ work-related self-concept, which we construe as followers’ psychological empowerment, consisting of the four sub-facets of meaning, competence, self-determination and impact. We further propose that psychological empowerment is positively related to flow experiences at work. In sum, we thus hypothesize that the effect of transformational leadership on employees’ flow experiences is mediated by psychological empowerment. Additionally, we propose that this indirect effect is moderated such that it is stronger for employees holding a formal leadership position. We tested the model with two two-wave questionnaire studies with employees (Study 1: N = 307 at time 1; N = 60 at time 2; Study 2: N = 611 at time 1; N = 271 at time 2) from different organizations. Path models reveal support for the mediation hypotheses in both samples but not for the moderated mediation hypothesis.     

Keeping up day-specific effects of transformational leadership: the role of followers’ emotion regulation

This diary study examines the role of day-specific transformational leadership for followers’ personal initiative. Building on Affective Events Theory, we proposed a direct effect of day-specific transformational leadership on followers’ personal initiative on the same day. Furthermore, we took a closer look at lagged effects of day-specific transformational leadership. More specifically, we hypothesized that positive effects of one day’s transformational leadership can endure until the next day for followers who apply beneficial emotion regulation strategies. We conducted a diary study over five consecutive working days among 97 employees. Two-level hierarchical linear modelling supported our hypotheses. As expected, day-specific transformational leadership positively predicted followers’ personal initiative on the same day. Furthermore, concerning the association between day-specific transformational leadership and followers’ personal initiative on the following day, there was a positive relation for followers applying beneficial emotion regulation strategies in terms of high cognitive reappraisal and low expressive suppression, respectively.     

新瓶旧酒或推陈出新：包容性领导是一种独立的领导类型吗？

包容性领导是解决当前职场中员工多样性问题的一种新型领导类型。由于领导类型众多且存在交叉重叠现象,包容性领导是否是一种独立的领导类型值得检验。176份纵向调查数据分析结果表明：与变革型领导、交易型领导和家长式领导相比,包容性领导具有独立的概念结构,在对领导成员交换和工作满意度的预测上具有显著的增进效应和优势效应。     

伦理型领导如何影响员工创造力:心理安全感与关系的作用

基于认知评价理论,以配对的328组员工为样本,探讨了伦理型领导与员工创造力的关系,及心理安全感、上下级关系在这一关系中的作用。结论:伦理型领导与员工心理安全感正相关;上下级关系与伦理型领导的交互作用强化了员工的心理安全感;心理安全感中介了伦理型领导对员工创造力的影响;上下级关系调节了心理安全感对伦理型领导与创造力关系间的中介作用。     

When positive and negative expectancies disrupt performance: regulatory focus as a catalyst

The present research investigates the impact of negative and positive stereotypic expectancies on cognitive test performance. A theoretical framework that relates expectancy effects to self‐regulatory processes as postulated by Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) is presented. Building on the differential sensitivity hypothesis proposed in this theoretical model, we argue that when self‐regulation in a prevention focus is activated individuals are particularly sensitive with regard to negative cues and therefore negative expectancies are likely to result in poor test performance due to an apprehension about meeting minimal goal standards. Conversely, when self‐regulation is guided by a promotion focus individuals are particularly sensitive with regard to positive cues and hence likely to show impaired performance when confronted with positive expectancies due to an apprehension about meeting maximal goal standards. The results of four experiments, relying on both situational and chronic regulatory focus, support these assumptions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spotlight on the Followers: An Examination of Moderators of Relationships Between Transformational Leadership and Subordinates’ Citizenship and Taking Charge

Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we revisit an often taken‐for‐granted assumption that transformational leadership is a universally positive management practice by examining subordinate‐based aspects attenuating the relationship between transformational leadership and followers’ citizenship and taking charge. Using data collected from 196 followers and their leaders situated in 55 workgroups in 2 Chinese organizations, we found that followers’ citizenship and taking charge were not influenced by transformational leadership when followers perceived leaders as prototypical and were highly identified with their workgroups. Furthermore, following a differential pattern for citizenship and taking charge, followers’ traditionality weakened the relationship with citizenship, whereas followers’ learning goal orientation attenuated the relationship with taking charge. Introducing contingencies and specifying their underlying logic broadens the current theoretical spectrum for both substitutes for leadership and transformational leadership.