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ABSTRACT
The psychometric properties of the measure of transformational leadership as measured by 20 items in Bass and Avolio's Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Form 5x) were examined. The examination was based on a sample of 372 chief executives in the United States government.
Keywords: Transformational Leadership; Public Sector Leadership; Psychometric Properties; MLQ 5X; Multifactor Leadership Questionniare
INTRODUCTION
Leadership is by far one of the most widely studied areas in literature. Many proposed theories have made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the concept of leadership. These theories can be categorized into four major schools: traits, behavioural, contingency, and visionary (see Dulewicz & Higgs, 2003; Partington, 2003). The visionary school has gained popularity over the past decades. Bass's (1985) seminal book titled 'Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations' represents one of the major contributions to the conceptualization of leadership. Building on the work of Burns (1978), Bass (1985) developed what is often referred to in literature as the Full-Range Leadership Theory (FRLT)(Antonakis & House, 2002). The theory fit leadership styles into three broad categories of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership. While the entire model has received a great deal of theoretical and practical attention (e.g., Antonakis, Avolio, & Sivasubramaniam, 2003; Toor & Ofori, 2009), the transformational leadership behaviour style (TLB) construct, in particular has garnered the utmost attention over the past decades in a variety of settings, such as, hospitals (e.g., Spinelli, 2006), banking (e.g., F.O. Walumbwa, Wang, Lawler, & Shi, 2004), sports (e.g., A. Yusof, 1998), sales (e.g., F.J. Yammarino & Dubinsky, 2006), police (e.g., Deluga & Souza, 2011), research and development (e.g., Keller, 1992), manufacturing (e.g., Edwards & Gill, 2012) and government (Muterera, 2008, 2012); thus is the focus of this study.
A review of literature suggests that some support is available concerning the psychometric properties (i.e., internal consistency reliability, factor structure, and predictive validity) (Barge & Schleuter, 1991) of Bass's transformational leadership construct. However, die construct is not without criticism (see Yukl, 1998; G. Yukl, 1999). For example, while a number of studies suggested that the factor structure of transformational leadership may not always be stable (see Bycio, Hackett, & Allen 1995; Carless, 1998; Tepper & Percy, 1994), anotiher study by Bycio and colleagues (1995) showed tìiat transformational leadership dimensions failed to...