The Causal Relationships among Transformational Leadership, Organizational Commitment, and Employee Effectiveness

Abstract

This study investigates the structural relationships among transformational leadership practices, organizational commitment, and employee effectiveness. Path analysis was used to understand the direct and indirect effects of four transformational leadership components, three organizational commitment types, and two employee effectiveness types. The results indicated that transformational leadership, especially as regards idealization influence and inspiration motivation components, directly enhances employees' extra-role behaviors and indirectly enhance employees' desire to stay in an organization through internalization, identification, and exchange organization commitments.

Keywords:

• transformational leadership
• organization commitment
• public employee
• employee effectiveness

Notes

¹ The trait approach asserts that a leader's personality is the main determinant of leadership effectiveness; leaders are born, not made (Woods, 1913; Wiggam, 1931; Birds 1940). The behavioral approach asserts that a person's expressions and actions are the determinants of leadership effectiveness (Yukl, 1994; McGregor, 1960), e.g., task management and human relations skills are major factors in employee effectiveness (Blake & Mouton (1964)). The situation-approach asserts that effective leadership roles depend on specific contexts, e.g., human relations may be effective in one situation but not in another, given that leader-follower relations and the leader's positional powers, organizational structures, and the nature of the tasks can moderate the effectiveness of leadership practices in relation to employee productivity (Fiedler, 1964).

²Excerpted from Bass, B. (1998). Transformational leadership: Industry, military, and educational impact. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. pp. 5–6.

³As suggested by Mertler and Vannetta (2005), missing paths can be omitted from the theoretical model, but they should be consistent with theory or confirmed by previous study. Furthermore, the excluded and included paths should be present in the model in roughly equal numbers.