Leading yourself and leading others: Linking self-leadership to transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership

Abstract

It has often been proposed that one must lead oneself before being able to lead others (e.g., Drucker, 1999; Manz & Sims, 1991; Pearce, 2007). In two studies, we empirically investigated associations among self-leadership (with subfacets) and the full range leadership model (transformational, transactional, laissez-faire leadership) in N = 447 professionals with leadership experience (Study 1) and N = 35 leaders with N = 151 followers (Study 2). In both studies, leaders' self-leadership was positively associated with active styles of leading (transformational and transactional leadership) and negatively with passive styles of leading (laissez-faire leadership), as indicated by self- and follower-reports. These relationships remained even after controlling for sex, age, and leadership experience. Overall, data support the notion that effectively leading oneself is associated with effectively leading others.

Keywords:

• Full range leadership model
• Laissez-faire leadership
• Self-leadership
• Transactional leadership
• Transformational leadership

Notes

¹ Charismatic and transformational leadership are conceptually strongly connected and sometimes even interchangeably used. For a detailed discussion, see Judge and Piccolo (2004).

² As can be seen in Table 4, multicollinearity was not an issue. Variance inflation factors (VIF) ranged from 1.04 to 2.12. VIFs below 5.00 (Menard, 1995) or even 10.00 (Neter, Wasserman, & Kutner, 1989) are not considered to indicate substantial problems with multicollinearity.

³ We computed significant differences between independent sample standardized regression coefficients beta with the program BetaDiff (Enzmann, 2011).

⁴ Additionally, leaders completed self-ratings on leadership and followers ratings of their leaders on self-leadership (with a shortened nine-item version of the RSLQ-D). No findings with these data are reported here as the purpose of Study 2 is solely to demonstrate how leaders' self-rated self-leadership is associated with their followers' other-ratings of leaders' leadership styles. The other data are presented in Furtner et al. (2011a).