Impact of Three Hundred Sixty Degree Development Process on Transformational Leadership within an Organization

Abstract

Continuous change is needed in today’s business environment due to economic turmoil, global competition and times of uncertainty. Organizations need to identify and develop leaders who have a global mindset and can identify and adapt to challenges. Leaders cannot address the challenges facing organizations, they need to identify ways be collaborative and involve others in order to help guide their organization forward and be successful. Organizations have realized that every employee is vital component to their success and are often considered the backbone to the organization. By allowing individuals at all levels of the organization to be involved in developing the vision, establishing work strategies and assignments brings new and rich ideas. Transformational leadership is one way leaders can become more effective by involving and developing others, specifically, followers in a way the rises everyone to a higher level of performance. Developing transformational leaders requires a process that provides feedback to the leader along with an emphasis on developing areas in which a leader needs to improve. One method is the 360-degree process that provides a vehicle for leaders to receive feedback on their leadership style and execution from surrounding others. This quantitative study examined whether a relationships between leaders who use 360-degree feedback process and leaders who do not use 360-degree process for developing transformational leaders. The study researched a sample population of 59 leaders and 165 surrounding others. Using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire scores were generated based on the leaders’ self-evaluation and scores from at least two individuals that surrounded the leader. Although the results revealed no significant differences in all attributes of transformational leadership, organizations would find benefits from incorporating a process that provided feedback to leaders along with plans for developing and improving leadership practices.