Leadership Research Summary:
- While leading through goals is usually associated with a task-oriented leadership style, the present work links goal setting to transformational leadership. An online survey with two time points was conducted with employees to investigate the influence of transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior via goal attributes. Findings indicate that transformational leaders influence the extent to which followers evaluate organizational goals as important and perceive them as attainable. Multiple mediation analysis revealed that these goal attributes transmit the effect of transformational leadership on followers’ job attitudes and proactive behavior. However, goal importance and goal attainability seem to be of differential importance for the different outcomes.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- Due to its well-established positive impact, transformational leadership has become a prevalent topic in leadership education within business schools throughout the world (Tourish et al., 2010). In small and medium-sized enterprises, however, leaders are rarely recruited from business schools, but rather are promoted into leadership positions based on their technical and professional expertise or the seniority principle. Such leaders often lack knowledge in managing and leading others as well as various skills necessary in successfully facilitating their followers’ goal pursuit. Therefore, they have to be equipped with leadership skills, which are relevant in effectively managing the goal setting process.
- Previous research has shown that transformational leadership behaviors can be developed in courses or training programs (e.g., Kelloway et al., 2000; Dvir et al., 2002). Such interventions may be tailored to specifically target the dissemination and pursuit of organizational goals. Trainings may start with an examination of the implicit theories of effective leadership and goal setting these leaders have in mind. Via 270- or 360-degree appraisal, they may be given insights into their own leadership behaviors and the way they are perceived by supervisors, colleagues, followers, and – should the occasion arise – customers. These analyses may be used as a starting point to improve the leaders’ behaviors as leaders may deduce a need for development by comparing their ideals and the way they are perceived.
- As an important learning goal, leadership trainings need to convey that the manner in which goals are communicated impacts the degree of importance followers attach to these goals. Frese et al. (2003) developed and evaluated an action theory based training to teach participants the inspirational communication of a vision. The training consisted of two components. On the onehand, participants had to develop a vision for their own department and to deliver an enthusiastic and inspiring speech propagating it. Based on feedback, the vision and the speech were constantly improved in further role-plays. On the other hand, participants were taught about the characteristics and the importance of visions. Relevant paralinguistic and content issues of charismatic visions were exemplified and situations in which the speech may be applied were discussed. As evaluation studies of this 1.5 days training module revealed good to excellent effect sizes (Frese et al., 2003), it should be incorporated into broader leadership training programs.
- Empirical evidence revealed that visions tight to charismatic or transformational leadership among others present an optimistic picture of the future, express confidence that the vision is attainable, or state the importance of followers’ participation (Berson et al., 2001). Contingent reward leaders, by contrast, draw an instrumental vision tight to a specific time frame or linked to extrinsic benefits (Sosik and Dinger, 2007). Thus, in order to be most effective, the particular themes a vision addresses deserve careful consideration within these trainings. Visions contain far-reaching, timeless, and relatively abstract ideas (Berson et al., 2015), whereas goal setting theory found goals to work best if they are specific, challenging and timed (Locke and Latham, 1990).
- In leading, however, both kinds are important (Latham and Locke, 1991). Berson et al. (2015) reason that the motivational effect of visions vs. goals depends on the characteristics of the specific situation in which they are articulated or assigned: If leaders are socially and spatially proximate to their followers, greater effects result if more specific, time-constrained, and challenging goals are set. If, by contrast, leaders are socially and spatially distant, abstract, far-reaching, and timeless visions are a better means to stimulate followers’ performance. Attributes of the situation and properties of the message a leader delivers, thus need to fit in order to best motivate followers (Berson et al., 2015). Accordingly, apart from learning to develop and articulate inspiring visions to increase the importance of organizational goals, training participants also need to learn about the goal setting theory and how goals need to be formulated and conveyed like it is already done in various transformational leadership trainings (e.g., Barling et al., 1996; Kelloway et al., 2000). In this context, leaders need to learn in which situations best to use either kind of communication strategy.
- The communication of more concrete, challenging, and timed goals also helps to increase followers’ trust in being able to achieve the super-ordinate vision (Berson et al., 2015). As such, modules on goal setting also serve in teaching leaders how to increase followers’ perception of an organizational goal’s attainability. Further behaviors, which lead followers to evaluate a goal to be attainable, also need to be developed and practiced in leadership trainings. Accordingly, leaders need to support followers and foster their impression of having control over the goal striving process as well as having several opportunities in achieving a certain goal. In order to increase followers’ perceptions of their control and opportunities, intellectual stimulation is an important leadership behavior.
- While training leaders, Barling et al. (1996) found this component of transformational leadership to be lowest among those participating in their intervention. To increase intellectually stimulating behaviors, participants were taught about the concept of transformational leadership, role-played these behaviors, and attained four monthly individual booster sessions with the researchers. In addition, leaders were encouraged to discuss new ideas with other training participants themselves in order to practice the behaviors they were meant to increase within their followers. Apart from intellectual stimulation, the information given, the role-plays, as well as the one-to-one coaching sessions also targeted the leaders’ individualized consideration. This behavior is important in fostering followers’ perception of supervisory support. As evidence on the effectiveness of this intervention, followers of those attending the training in sum rated their leaders higher on transformational leadership behaviors than those of a non-participating control group (Barling et al., 1996). Training participants may further be encouraged to see things from their followers’ perspective and to anticipate potential obstacles followers might be confronted with during the goal pursuit. Based on that, leaders may be better able to provide support instrumental in achieving the goals they assign. As, compared to eclectic leadership trainings, transformational leadership trainings resulted in higher ratings of followers’ self-efficacy (Dvir et al., 2002), such trainings should be helpful in increasing followers’ perception of being able to attain the goal their leaders set.
- Several months after the initial training, a follow-up session could help to review the implementation of the behavior leaders learned during the training program, to exchange experiences with fellow trainees, and to revise leadership strategies aimed at increasing the importance and attainability of organizational goals. Fellow training participants could provide assistance and feedback on how to transfer the training content into daily work routines and how to deal with obstacles. Such booster sessions aim at maintaining the transfer of training for a longer period of time (Saks and Belcourt, 2006). In sum, transformational leadership trainings have led to modest improvements across the following 2 years (see Bass, 1999).