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Abstract
Over the past 20 years, the Multifactor Leadership Theory (MLT) has become one of the most dominant theories of leadership. This popularity is due, in part, to the broad range of leadership behaviors included in the theory. Bass (1985) and colleagues conceptualized leadership as consisting of three primary factors (i.e., transformational, transactional, and passive/laissez-faire leadership) and prior research has clearly linked transformational and transactional leadership to important outcomes, such as employee commitment and organizational performance. Furthermore, prior research has established that these behaviors can be developed through training. However, it is less well understood how the importance of these behaviors changes across organizational settings. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine (across two data sets) the relative importance of these leadership factors across various outcomes (i.e., team potency/efficacy, team cohesion, and job performance) and organizational contexts (i.e., military and healthcare). Results indicate that transformational leadership behaviors are critically important for team cohesion and team potency/efficacy (Data Set 1) and leader effectiveness (Data Set 2), and that transactional leadership becomes particularly salient with regard to actual task performance and extra effort (Data Set 1 and 2). Implications of these results for practitioners are discussed, and a useful taxonomy to guide leadership development is provided.
Introduction
Effective leadership has been recognized as a central determinant of growth and success within organizational settings ranging from profit seeking enterprises to amateur and professional athletics, religious organizations, and military units (Judge & Piccolo, 2004; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996; Northouse, 2007). Such recognition has resulted in increasing interest in leadership development, with organizations investing greater and greater resources into leadership development and succession planning (Bolt, 2007; Carter, Ulrich, & Goldsmith, 2005; Hernez-Broome & Hughes, 2004; Riggio, 2008).
Across settings, transformational leadership behaviors have become one of the most dominant approaches to understanding leadership effectiveness (Lowe & Gardner, 2001) and certain transformational leadership behaviors are included in leadership development programs from companies operating in industries ranging from on-line retail (e.g., Zappos.com) to finance (e.g., GE capital; Hsieh, 2010). Furthermore, there is substantial evidence that transformational leadership behaviors lead to important individual-level outcomes such as employee commitment, motivation and task performance and organization-level outcomes such as firm performance (Barling, Weber, & Kelloway, 1996; Bono & Judge, 2004; Bycio,...