Is Leadership in the Eye of the Beholder? A Study of Intended and Perceived Leadership Practices and Organizational Performance

Leadership is a matter of both intentions and perceptions, which do not necessarily always match. Because employees’ motivation and commitment are only affected by leadership if they notice it, employee‐perceived leadership is expected to have a stronger correlation with organizational performance than leader‐intended leadership. This expectation is tested for transformational and transactional leadership, as both types of practices are expected to increase performance. Using a sample of 1,621 teachers and 79 Danish high school principals, the authors find that leader‐intended and employee‐perceived transformational and transactional leadership are only weakly correlated and that only employee‐perceived leadership practices (both transformational and transactional) are significantly related to objectively measured school performance. The results show that it is important to distinguish between intended and perceived leadership and that leaders should be aware of how their practices are perceived.     

Examining the Nature and Significance of Leadership in Government Organizations

Though the mainstream organizational literature has advanced in the last 20 years with the integration of transformational and distributed leadership theories, as well as genuine attempts at comprehensive models, the public sector literature has lagged, especially in utilizing large‐scale empirical studies. This study takes advantage of a very large government data set to test the utility of one of the best known theories, the “full range” leadership theory of Bernard Bass. It addresses three important research questions: How inclusive is Bass’s operational definition of leadership? How much of an impact do Bass’s leadership competencies have on follower satisfaction? Finally, how important is transformational leadership compared to transactional leadership in government settings? The results indicate that Bass’s broad definition of leadership comes quite close to capturing what federal employees perceive to be effective leadership. The relationship between good leadership in an organization and follower satisfaction is also presented as an important outcome in the federal government. Finally, both transactional and transformational leadership are perceived as important in the federal government, although transformational leadership is considered slightly more important even after shifting one important factor, individualized consideration, back to the transactional model.     

Does Perceived Societal Impact Moderate the Effect of Transformational Leadership on Value Congruence? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Transformational leadership, it is argued, aligns employees' values with those of their organization. Empirical research has found a positive relationship between transformational leadership and value congruence. Yet studies rely predominantly on cross‐sectional research designs that limit causal conclusions and have not uncovered the potential contextual conditions of this argument. This article argues that transformational leadership positively affects value congruence in public service organizations, but only when employees see that their jobs impact the well‐being of other people and society. To test the relationship between transformational leadership and value congruence and the moderating effect of perceived societal impact, the article combines a field experiment on 79 managers of public service organizations and a balanced survey panel of their 583 employees. Consistent with the expectation, results indicate heterogeneous treatment effects, implying that employees' perceived societal impact is important to consider when transformational leaders strive to align the values of individual employees and the organization.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

Only When We Agree! How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal‐oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership‐PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal‐oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in)congruence before implementing goal‐oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.     

Pulling the Levers: Transformational Leadership,Public Service Motivation,and Mission Valence

This article contributes to our understanding of public service motivation and leadership by investigating ways in which organizational leaders can reinforce and even augment the potential effects of public service motivation on employees’ attraction to the organization’s mission (mission valence). The results contribute to two research questions. First, the findings provide new evidence on the sources of public service motivation. The authors find that transformational leadership is an organizational factor associated with higher public service motivation. Second, the article examines the relationship between transformational leadership and mission valence. The authors find that transformational leadership has an important indirect effect on mission valence through its influence on clarifying organizational goals and fostering public service motivation.     

Communicating the Vision: How Face‐to‐Face Dialogue Facilitates Transformational Leadership

For public managers facing political and structural constraints, transformational leadership promises to meaningfully improve outcomes by communicating an inspiring vision of the organization. But this promise rests to a great degree on the communication skills and behaviors of the leader. A better understanding of how transformational leadership functions in organizations therefore requires a deeper application of theory from the field of communications. This article explores the question of what communication behaviors facilitate transformational leadership. A media richness framework is applied to propose that transformational leaders will be most effective when employing a face‐to‐face dialogue approach to communication. Using a multisource longitudinal research design, the authors find support for this proposition in an empirical test of 256 Danish tax units, lower and upper secondary schools, child care centers, and bank branches. The findings also show that size matters, with diminishing effectiveness of face‐to‐face dialogue in larger organizations.     

Employee Perceived Effect of Leadership Training: Comparing Public and Private Organizations

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with increases in behaviors linked to both transformational leadership and the use of verbal rewards, but only for public sector organizations. There is no impact in private sector organizations. Transactional leadership training appears to be equally effective in stimulating the use of pecuniary rewards in both public and private organizations.     

Valuing Diversity in Political Organizations: Gender and Token Minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives

Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual‐level colleague valuation is greatest when the minority group is smallest. We test this prediction using member‐to‐member leadership political action committee (PAC) contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results obtain strong, albeit not uniform, support for the theory, demonstrating that the gender gap in colleague valuations declines as preference divergence increases in all but one instance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the theory and evidence indicate that women serving in the U.S. House of Representatives receive less support from men colleagues as their ranks increase.     

Predictors of Administrative and Technological Innovations in Nonprofit Organizations

This study examines the effects of human and structural/process factors on two types of innovation—administrative and technological—in a sample of nonprofit organizations. The results indicate that factors that are favorable to administrative innovations differ from those that are conducive to technological innovation. Three variables are significant predictors of administrative innovation: centralization, transformational leadership, and the executive director’s job tenure. Transformational leadership contributes significantly to the model of technological innovation. Based on the results of this study, the author provides implications for nonprofit management and future research.     

Management of Australian Water Utilities: The Significance of Transactional and Transformational Leadership

What organisational factor has the most significant impact on the management of water utilities? This article seeks the views of middle managers in several water utilities across four Australian states to address this question. It also examines their views of leadership in their organisation. It draws upon Bass's full‐range leadership theory to examine their views on three models of leadership: transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and a combination of both transactional and transformational leadership. The respondents identify leadership as the most critical enabling factor for the effective management of water utilities. They believe that effective leadership requires a mix of transactional and transformational leadership skills. They state that their supervisor's leadership skills are below their expectation of an effective leader. These leadership issues are discussed in the article.     

Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy

Saber rattling is a prominent tool of the U.S. president's foreign policy leadership. Yet there has been no study of how presidential saber rattling affects international or domestic political outcomes. This study evaluates how presidential saber rattling affects U.S. economic behavior and performance. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that presidential rhetoric affects the risks that economic actors are willing to take, as well as the consequences of these resulting behaviors for U.S. economic performance. Using monthly time series running from January 1978 through January 2005, vector autoregression methods are applied to show that increased presidential saber rattling produces increased perceptions of negative economic news, declining consumer confidence, lower personal consumption expenditures, less demand for money, and slower economic growth. More broadly, the study demonstrates an important linkage between the president's two most important roles: foreign and economic policy leadership. The president's foreign policy pronouncements not only impact other nations, but also affect domestic economic outcomes.     

Transformational Leadership and Public Service Motivation: Driving Individual and Organizational Performance

Despite growing evidence about prosocial motivations and their effects on employee behavior, how can new public service motivation research translate into more effective management practices—which, so far, regrettably remain underdeveloped? Increasingly, public service motivation studies have moved from understanding what motivates public servants to exploring how public service motives influence performance. Similarly, greater attention is now paid to the practices of transformational leadership. Drawing on concepts from transformational leadership, this essay explores how managers can harness the positive aspects of public service motivation to enhance employee and organizational performance and outlines strategies that can help managers incorporate public service motivation values across management systems.     

Law of Space Resources and Operations on Celestial Bodies: Implications for Legislation in the United States

The U.S. assertion of a right to own resources harvested from space is consistent with the distinction in international law governing analogous res communis areas between resources harvested from a common area and the common area itself. Under the Outer Space Treaty regime, private entities do not have any more right to appropriate celestial bodies than governments do. However, U.S. law does not give private entities such a right. The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act’s chapter on Space Resource Commercial Exploration and Utilization generally avoids taking a position on exactly how to deal with disputes in the event the activities of entities from the United States and other states interfere with each other. The U.S. law does not assert a right to declare safety zones or otherwise exercise jurisdiction outside space objects, but doing so can, under some circumstances, be consistent with international law. Many of the specifics of what rules will govern the gathering of space resources remain undetermined, yet the act’s basic premise is correct: international law and the treaty obligations of the United States allow for the U.S. government to authorize its citizens to own resources obtained from space.     

Information Handling Challenges in Complex Systems

ABSTRACT:

Even when leaders exhibit desirable leadership styles, the effectiveness of their behaviors on organizational outcomes may be influenced by the structural distance between them and their followers. Nonetheless, previous empirical research on the relationships between leadership styles and outcomes has largely ignored the role of leader distance in public administration. Using panel data drawn from the US federal government, this study explores how transformational and transactional leadership styles affect employee turnover behavior and how span of control as a proxy for leader distance moderates those relationships. The statistical results indicate that transformational leadership is negatively related to turnover behavior, whereas transactional leadership is positively related to turnover behavior. Further analysis shows that span of control significantly moderates the relationships between the two leadership styles and employee turnover behavior such that organizations benefit more from transformational leaders with a broad span of control than from those with a narrow span of control. Conversely, transactional leaders with a narrow span of control are better at reducing turnover than those with a broad span of control. The implications and contributions of these results for public administration are discussed.     

Efficiency,Incentives, and Transformational Leadership: Understanding Collaboration Preferences in the Public Sector

In the public sector, participant attitudes are an important determinant of the success of inter-organizational collaboration initiatives. In this study, a model of employee willingness to collaborate is proposed in which the influence of transformational leadership is determined in part by the performance orientation of the organizational context in which it is enacted. The theoretical model is tested empirically using survey data collected from public employees in South Korea and regression-based Monte Carlo simulation. The analysis suggests that the effect of transformational leadership is amplified by an organization’s emphasis on internal efficiency and its use of performance-based incentives, factors that themselves have independent positive and negative effects, respectively, on attitudes about collaboration. This study links transformational leadership to an increasingly necessary process in the public sector and highlights its context-dependent influence. Implications of the findings are discussed, including the notion that the efficacy of tactics adopted to support inter-organizational collaboration may be a function of their consistency with the realities of established organizational policies and processes.     

The Leader–Follower Dyad: The Link Between Leader and Follower Perceptions of Transformational Leadership and Its Impact on Job Satisfaction and Organizational Performance

This study seeks to establish and test the relationships between both leaders’ and followers’ perceptions of leaders’ transformational leadership behavior and its relationship with job satisfaction and organizational performance. We aim to represent the managerial and psychosocial outcomes in the leader–follower dyad. The study also determines the relative contribution of the two constructs of the leader–follower dyad and their relationship with organizational performance. Since both leaders and followers estimated the leaders’ transformational leadership behavior, two models were tested: first, a leader-perception model examining the relationships among transformational leadership, job satisfaction, and organizational performance using data on transformational leadership from the leaders’ perspective; and second, a follower-perception model examining the relationships among the same three constructs using transformational leadership estimates from the followers. We then explore the corresponding parameters in the two models to determine if there are significant differences in the relationships among the constructs, thereby determining the impact of leader vs. follower perceptions. Structural equation modelling based on a sample of 372 leader–follower matched responses identified how transformational leadership has a significant, positive relationship with employee job satisfaction and organizational performance. Although the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational performance was similar in the two models, in the follower-perception model the effect was almost entirely mediated by employee job satisfaction, whereas there were both mediated and direct effect in the leader-perception model.     

Predictors of Homelessness Among Families and Single Adults After Exit From Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Programs: Evidence From the Department of Veterans Affairs Supportive Services for Veteran Families Program

This article assesses the extent and predictors of homelessness among veterans (both veterans in families with children and single adults veterans) exiting the Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program, which is a nationwide homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing program geared primarily toward those experiencing crisis homelessness. Among rapid re-housing participants, 16% and 26% of single adult veterans experienced an episode of homelessness at 1 and 2 years post-SSVF exit; the comparable figures at those follow-up times for veterans in families were 9.4% and 15.5%, respectively. Relatively fewer single adult veterans and veterans in families receiving homelessness prevention services experienced an episode of homelessness at 1 and 2 years post-SSVF exit. veteran-level characteristics, including age, gender, prior history of homelessness, and recent engagement with U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care, were generally more salient predictors of homelessness following SSVF exit than variables measuring SSVF program factors or community-level housing market conditions.     

U.S.‐Style Leadership for English Local Government?

Significant changes in the political management of local authorities in the United Kingdom are now taking place as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government since 1997. The new political management models aim to modernize local governance by strengthening local leadership, streamlining decision making, and enhancing local accountability. These changes owe much to U.S. experience: They involve the introduction of a separation of powers between an executive and an assembly, and they allow local authorities to introduce directly elected mayors for the first time ever. Is U.K. local government beginning to adopt what might be described as U.S.‐style approaches to local governance? The evidence suggests the new institutional designs for U.K. local authorities represent a radical shift toward U.S.‐style local leadership and decision making. However, the U.K. central state remains heavily involved in the details of local decision making, to an extent that would be unthinkable in the United States.     

COVID-19 and American Attitudes toward U.S.-China Disputes

The COVID-19 outbreak has fueled tension between the U.S. and China. Existing literature in international relations rarely focuses on virus outbreaks as factors affecting international relations between superpower countries, nor does research examine an outbreak’s potential influence on the public’s opinion about their country’s foreign policy. To bridge this research gap, this study explores the extent to which the American public may be prone to favor policies that “punish” China via existing U.S.-China disputes, such as the South China Sea dispute and the U.S.-China trade war. I conducted an online survey using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and ran multinomial and ordered logit models to estimate the association between an individual’s preferred policies and the country or government an individual blame for the impact of the pandemic. After controlling several essential confounding factors, such as one’s levels of nationalism and hawkishness, I found strong evidence that there is a positive association between people’s attribution of blame to the Chinese government and the likelihood of supporting aggressive policy options in the two disputes with China. That is to say, U.S. citizens who believe that the Chinese government is solely culpable for the outbreak in the U.S., compared to those who think otherwise, are more likely to support hawkish policy options, such as confrontational military actions, economic sanctions, or higher tariff rates. The research provides a glimpse into where Americans may stand in these disputes with China and the potential development of U.S.-China relations in the post-pandemic era.