Leadership & Technology

19 Pages 4729 Words

Leadership and Spirituality


While the study of leadership has been dominated by situational approaches for the past three decades (Fiedler, 1967; House, 1971; Kerr and Jermier, 1978; Howell and Dorfman, 1981; Schriesheim, Neider, Scandura, 1998; Shamir and Howell, 1999; Yukl, 1998), little of the transformational leadership research and theory has considered situational moderators. A variety of situational aspects are covered by these theories, including leader member relations, task structure, leader position power, follower ability level, follower locus of control, and follower authoritarianism. With the exception of the work of Howell and Avolio (1993) and Keller (1992), situational moderators of the effectiveness of transformational leadership have not been thoroughly examined. We do not contend that situational moderators are of greater significance for transformational leadership than for other leadership constructs; however, we believe that the role of situational moderators for transformational leadership is sufficient to require further research.
We address two important leadership questions. Is transformational leadership universally effective or are there situational moderators, which augment or limit its effectiveness? Is transformational leadership more appropriately viewed in terms of individual-level analyses or of multi-level analyses? First, we examine the literature on the potential moderators within the transformational leadership paradigm and on the appropriate level of analysis for transformational leadership. The present research examines the potential moderator effects of the need for autonomy and of growth need strength. In addition, we examine whether transformational leaders adapt their behaviors to different subordinates or behave the same way with all of them.
Building on the work of Burns (1978), Bass (1985) defined transformational leadership and established a measurement instrument for the constru...