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Introduction, appendix 1: interview topic list.

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Leadership Behavior Repertoire: An Exploratory Study of the Concept and Its Potential for Understanding Leadership in Public Organizations

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Marieke van der Hoek, Sandra Groeneveld, Maarja Beerkens, Leadership Behavior Repertoire: An Exploratory Study of the Concept and Its Potential for Understanding Leadership in Public Organizations, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance , Volume 4, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 363–378, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvab022

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Rapidly accumulating literature on public leadership tends to zoom in on specific aspects of leaders’ behavior. Such a fragmented approach may overlook the most challenging aspect of effective leadership: combining diverse behaviors in relation to various stakeholders to match contextual needs. This article therefore argues for a comprehensive approach that recognizes the behavioral complexity of most contemporary leaders, particularly in ambiguous contexts. The concept of leadership behavior repertoire facilitates this. The article conceptualizes the perspective of the leadership behavior repertoire and illustrates in which ways leaders combine behavioral options from their repertoire using data from in-depth interviews with public leaders. Based on our findings, we propose integration of this perspective into the field’s research agenda to make our understanding of leadership in public organizations more complete. Moreover, the repertoire perspective can challenge and advance theorizing of leadership in relation to its context and outcomes in a more comprehensive way.

Academic interest in leadership has been growing rapidly in the last few decades. Public management scholars, too, dedicate an increasing amount of attention to leadership in public organizations ( Vandenabeele, Andersen, and Leisink 2014 ; Van Wart 2013 ; Vogel and Masal 2015 ). Research focused on the individual level of analysis, studying leadership behavior of public managers at various organizational levels, has taken flight. Studying leadership at this individual level is valuable to grasp processes underlying policy making and implementation, taking shape in public organizations. A large share of research in this tradition focusses on “leadership in organizations” ( Dubin 1979 ; Hunt and Ropo 1995 ), referring to leadership as supervising individual employees. Rich literature on transformational and transactional leadership, for example, primarily examines the downward supervisory relationship of managers motivating employees ( Ospina 2017 ; Vandenabeele, Andersen, and Leisink 2014 ; Vogel and Masal 2015 ). “Leadership of organizations” ( Dubin 1979 ; Hunt and Ropo 1995 ), on the other hand, looks at a leadership role in handling issues at the level of the organization or unit in relation to internal and external stakeholders. Middle managers typically are expected to perform a variety of roles simultaneously, yet the literature in public management tends to ignore this variety and to compartmentalize leadership into isolated roles.

In this article, we argue that research on leadership behavior at the individual level in public organizations could be advanced by looking not only deeper into dyadic manager–employee leadership behavior, but also by adopting a broader conceptualization spanning a more varied range of behaviors and their interactions with each other. Leaders probably do not perceive the roles as clearly distinct and separable in their daily activities as researchers often present them. In other words, we should understand the broader “repertoire” of behaviors that leaders have at their disposal, not only single elements within the repertoire. The behaviors that are studied in isolation are important, but when we ignore other types of behavior that leaders are simultaneously engaged in, the danger is that we lose sight of the “big picture” of challenges that leaders face on a daily basis ( Head 2010 ).

We argue that combining various behaviors is the essence of leadership (see also Pedersen et al. 2019 ). The OECD (2001) indeed signaled that leaders need diverse competences to cope with complex challenges in the public sector, which recent country studies reiterated ( Gerson 2020 ). Leadership training programs in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Mexico prepare leaders for a range of behaviors: from networking and collaborating, directing and managing internal processes, envisioning and facilitating change, to inspiring and creating commitment among employees ( OECD 2001 ). The relational character of leadership is explicitly addressed due to increasingly collaborative set-ups for public value creation: leaders need to work with a range of internal and external stakeholders across boundaries of countries, sectors, organizations, and professions, as well as throughout the hierarchy, from employees to top management ( Gerson 2020 ; OECD 2001 ).

To extend our understanding of leadership and its relationship with organizational variables, we can benefit from examining repertoires of behaviors. A leadership behavior repertoire can be described as a set of behavioral options at a leader’s disposal to address a variety of issues in a suitable fashion ( Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ). Yukl (2012) and recently Pedersen et al. (2019) and Kramer et al. (2019) also acknowledge that looking at single behavioral types provides only partial comprehension of leadership. Leaders often have to combine various types of action because they are faced with multiple tasks and objectives, and they need to balance competing demands on scarce resources ( Quinn 1984 ). Therefore, the effectiveness of leadership depends on the variety of leadership behaviors instead of a particular type ( Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ; Havermans et al. 2015 ). Taking the perspective of leadership behavior repertoires can assist in understanding leadership in its complexity, complementing ongoing efforts in the field.

Looking at leadership behavior repertoires is particularly relevant in contexts that are characterized by ambiguity. Ambiguity creates a need for leadership ( Moore 1995 ), yet poses challenges for many public leaders in balancing multiple needs from their environment. This means that leaders are challenged to adopt behavioral strategies to match these contingencies. This is typical for public organizations: the different values, conflicting goals, and competing interests of a range of stakeholders at stake in public organizations confront leaders with simultaneous demands, which are often vague and/or potentially conflicting ( Davis and Stazyk 2015 ; Hood 1991 ; Moore 1995 ). Moreover, the saliency of issues changes. The variety of interpretations of what is to be done makes the leadership context ambiguous and puts leaders in a position of equivocal decision-making ( Christensen et al. 2018 ; Chun and Rainey 2005 ; Feldman 1989 ). In addition, leaders in public organizations operate in an environment with increasingly complex organizational structures and ambiguous authority relationships. Formal authority is often fragmented and distributed among several organizational members, which means that leaders are often not fully allowed to make decisions ( Getha-Taylor et al. 2011 ; Groeneveld and Van de Walle 2011 ; Gronn 2002 ; Shamir 1999 ). Consequently, this dispersion of power creates leadership interdependencies and requires that leaders involve various other stakeholders to accomplish their objectives ( Gronn 2002 ). It can therefore be expected that leaders within such contexts need to combine many different leadership behaviors from their repertoire and do so in various directions to stimulate collaboration: influencing and facilitating subordinates, peers, superiors, and external stakeholders—multiple at a time ( ‘t Hart 2014 ; Moore 1995 ; van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman 2016 ). This context of ambiguity induces leadership that is best approached through a repertoire perspective.

This study therefore presents the following question: How can leadership in an ambiguous context be conceptualized as a behavior repertoire? To allow a comprehensive understanding, leadership is defined as “the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives.” ( Yukl 2008 , 8). This definition is adopted, because framing leadership as a process highlights that leadership is a continuous effort that encompasses a wide range of activities. Indeed, from the organizational science and generic leadership literature we can conclude that leadership behavior is diverse, and leaders have to engage in a variety of behaviors to be effective ( Behrendt, Matz, and Göritz 2017 ; Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ; Yukl 2012) . This comprises behaviors that are frequently distinguished as “leadership” and “management.” While those are often seen as distinct, both types are important and complement each other ( Bedeian and Hunt 2006 ), and following Yukl (2012) , it can be all seen as leadership behavior. Managers, as formal leaders, are often expected to perform both ( Head 2010 ). Furthermore, incorporating the relational character highlights that leadership takes shape in interaction with a variety of stakeholders. Besides the typical focus on subordinates in research on individual leaders’ behavior, the broader public management literature teaches that superiors, peers, or external actors are included in the process of leadership. This accommodates Moore’s (1995) perspective that public managers work in different directions—downwards, upwards, sidewards, and outwards ( van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman 2016 ).

This article conceptualizes a repertoire perspective on leadership behavior and illustrates its relevance with accounts of leadership behavior repertoire uses based on in-depth interviews with public leaders. Conceptualizing is an essential building block for theory development: developing concepts that are aligned with the empirical world facilitates realistic empirical research and elaboration of theories. We thereby aim to contribute to public management research on leadership by suggesting how integration of a repertoire perspective can advance the field’s current research agenda and our understanding of leadership in its complexity. A qualitative approach is adopted to integrate the situational context of leaders in our understanding of leadership. Accounting for context is relevant, because characteristics of the context in which leaders behave affect leadership (e.g., George, Van de Walle, and Hammerschmidt 2019 ; Nielsen and Cleal 2011 ; Porter and McLaughlin 2006 ; Schmidt and Groeneveld 2021 ; Stoker, Garretsen, and Soudis 2019 ). Building on contingency theory’s premise that “one size does not fit all,” studying leadership by the same person in different situations is particularly facilitated by adopting a repertoire perspective (cf. Pedersen et al. 2019 ). Elaborating empirically how leaders combine diverse options from their repertoire, varying between situations, highlights the complexity of leadership and the need for further research to adopt a conceptualization of leadership behavior as repertoire.

The article proceeds with a discussion of previous research on leadership in the public management literature to build the study’s conceptual framework. Next, the empirical setting and methodological choices will be elaborated. The subsequent section shows various uses of a leadership behavior repertoire highlighted by the ambiguous context. The article concludes with a discussion on the potential contribution of the repertoire perspective, emphasizing its theoretical and methodological implications. Building on current lines of research, we argue that the field’s research agenda would benefit from adopting a repertoire perspective, since this more comprehensive conceptualization can stimulate theoretical and empirical work connected to the bigger picture of leadership challenges. Thereby it can challenge and advance our understanding of leadership and its relationships with other organizational phenomena.

The Leadership Behavior Repertoire: A Conceptual Framework

In an ambiguous context, competing demands present a variety of challenges for leadership that require leaders to use different types of leadership behavior suitable for a variety of purposes. Recently, Pedersen et al. (2019) show that managers engage in a range of different behaviors. Their study provides support for studying leadership from a more holistic perspective that acknowledges the behavioral complexity of public managers. These authors also argue that a more complex conceptualization has been missing despite efforts to develop typologies of management and leadership. A similar effort by Kramer et al. (2019) , who focused on leadership in interorganizational collaboration, confirms this call for a more comprehensive perspective. Therefore, we conceptualize leadership as a leadership behavior repertoire. Building on the work of Quinn (1984) and Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn (1995) , a leadership behavior repertoire can be seen as a set of behavioral options that can be matched to the circumstances at hand. This concept embraces the idea that leadership is complex and is characterized by a diversity of behaviors used in combination.

Research on leadership in the public management literature contains a variety of elements relevant for a repertoire conceptualization of leadership, scattered in separate research traditions. These traditions define and conceptualize leadership distinctively. Two distinctions underlie this separation. A first distinction concerns the operationalization of leadership: the literature shows variety in focusing either on styles, behaviors, or relations. These operationalizations are not mutually exclusive, yet prior research tends to maintain a more narrow focus. A second distinction concerns the level of abstraction and aggregation. One part of relevant literature discusses empirical constructs focused on individuals, while another share involves a broader governance mode concept, centered on networks. We discuss three prominent lines of public management research that contribute valuable elements of leadership behavior repertoires and point out their positions on the two distinctions discussed.

Firstly, research on leadership of individual leaders in (public) organizations tends to concentrate on leadership styles, in particular transactional, transformational, and charismatic leadership ( Lord et al. 2017 ; Ospina 2017 ; van Knippenberg and Sitkin 2013; , Vogel and Masal 2015 ; Yukl 2012 ). These studies focus on the downward dyadic relationship between manager and employee, in which leaders motivate employees to perform well (e.g., Jensen et al. 2019 ; Vermeeren, Kuipers, and Steijn 2014 ). This tradition has an empirical individual-centered approach. Its measurement involves motivating behaviors, but the main focus is put on leaders’ style of conduct instead of the actions themselves. Examining styles tells us something about how leaders implement their actions without taking the range of behaviors into account. Although the Full-Range Leadership Theory and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (e.g., Antonakis, Avolio, and Sivasubramaniam 2003 ) form an attempt at a more-encompassing approach of leadership styles, it is still limited to the supervisor–employee relationship.

Secondly, internal and external management ( O’Toole and Meier 1999 ; Pedersen et al. 2019 ) and managerial networking ( Torenvlied et al. 2013 ; van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman 2016 ) is relevant here, although these studies speak in terms of management rather than leadership. This research tradition highlights that leadership encompasses multiple relationships with a range of stakeholders, inside and outside the organization. Again, this tradition has an individual, empirical focus. Whereas measurement of internal management includes specification of concrete behaviors, measurement of external management and networking often only involves the frequency of interactions with various stakeholders in different directions. This measurement then lacks specification of types of leadership behaviors used within such stakeholder relationships.

Finally, collaborative governance research involves collective or distributed leadership. This tradition has a strong focus on collaboration and relationships with a wide range of actors, reflecting that managing networked structures instead of single organizations takes center stage ( Bryson, Crosby, and Stone 2015 ; Crosby, ‘t Hart, and Torfing 2017 ). In contrast to the other two lines of enquiry, this type of research is concerned with collective leadership as a governance concept: leadership is treated as the product of the dynamics of many individuals’ actions and does not concern leadership behavior of individual leaders (e.g., Ospina 2017 ). In a recent study, Cristofoli, Trivellato, and Verzillo (2019) combine the individual and network focus, by investigating managers’ network behaviors to assess network effectiveness. While this and similar studies add on to the external management and networking literature (and are equally not speaking of leadership), leadership largely remains a governance concept in this tradition.

The public management leadership literature is thus empirically rich yet fragmented across various traditions, and not aligned (see also Ospina 2017 ). Research in the tradition that shares our focus on the individual level of leaders’ behavior generally operationalizes leadership rather narrowly focused on motivating behaviors in the downwards, dyadic relationship between manager and employees. While this research could benefit from the variety of insights from other traditions, they are rarely integrated. As a result of the fragmentation and disconnection, a comprehensive view that shows how leaders use the diversity of behaviors and combine various behaviors remains absent. Yet, effective leadership comes about when leaders employ the variety of their leadership behavior repertoire ( Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ; Havermans et al. 2015 ; Hooijberg 1996 ). Approaching leadership with a repertoire perspective can overcome this.

The leadership behavior repertoire is a collection of behavioral options available to a leader to pick and choose from to find a way to act suitable in light of the circumstances. The repertoire embodies the variety of roles (Dension, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995) leaders fulfill that can be enacted by a range of behaviors in relation to a range of actors in different directions. The behavioral options then comprise combinations of behaviors differing in orientation (task, relations, change, external environment; Yukl 2012 ) and directions of action (upwards and downwards in the hierarchy to superiors and subordinates, sidewards to those in comparable positions, and outwards to external stakeholders ( Moore 1995 ; van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman 2016 )). Leaders have leeway to make various combinations: combinations can be more extensive or more simple, and there is no fixed combination between behavior types and relations in which they are used. The repertoire signifies that leaders have options to adapt to changing situations.

In sum, a repertoire conceptualization sees leadership behavior comprehensively in terms of behaviors and relationships and captures interactions between various behavioral options. Leadership repertoires are not just a sum of its separate elements. The need for an integrated view of leadership behavior through a repertoire perspective will be illustrated below and discussed in the research agenda.

Research Setting

To illustrate how leaders use the leadership behavior repertoire, an empirical setting characterized by contextual ambiguity provides a highlighting opportunity. When ambiguity in the context of leaders is omnipresent, leaders are likely forced to employ and combine diverse behaviors, because no clear guidance (clear priorities between interests, regulations, formal authority) is available to them to accomplish goals directly. While such ambiguity can be found throughout the public sector, it is particularly pronounced within universities. Therefore, universities were selected as a typical case ( Gerring 2006 ), in line with the tradition in organizational studies ( Askling and Stensaker 2002 ; Cohen and March 1974 ; March and Olsen 1979 ). Contextual ambiguity is particularly pronounced within universities, for two reasons.

Firstly, ambiguity is an ever-present phenomenon at universities, since universities work on multiple goals at the same time, involving research, education, and outreach tasks. Thereby they have to deal with a range of stakeholders with different interests, such as employees from multiple faculties and departments, students, and external stakeholders such as ministries or partner organizations ( Bryman and Lilley 2009 ; Enders 2012 ; Rainey and Jung 2015 ). March and Olsen (1979) , in their highly cited study on ambiguity and choice in organizations, illustrate their argument by the empirical study of universities based on the observation that educational institutions are prone to ambiguity: “goals that are unclear, technologies that are imperfectly understood, histories that are difficult to interpret, and participants who wander in and out” (8). This forms a point where ambiguity for leaders can emerge, since this creates room for various interpretations of priorities and desirable courses of action. It is then likely to generate variety in leadership behavior—both in terms of what is done and the complexity of this behavior.

Additionally, the complexity of universities’ organizational structures enhances the need to combine a range of leadership behaviors and work in multiple directions. Universities operate a system of shared governance, which means that the decision-making authority of leaders in universities is often limited and shared between different formal positions while professionals enjoy much autonomy ( Bolden, Petrov, and Gosling 2009 ; Pearce, Wassenaar, and Wood 2018 ; Seeber et al. 2015 ). This adds structural complexity, which may affect what leaders can do in terms of leadership behavior. As a result, it is expected there is a marked need to use a variety of leadership behaviors from their repertoire.

Data Collection

Data have been collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with leaders. Interviews provide rich data that can show how leaders combine various roles and behaviors in different circumstances. The interviews focused on what leaders do in ambiguous situations, with topics covering how leaders perceive their leadership roles, what tensions they experience, and how they fill in their role and address such challenges (see topic list in Appendix   1 ). Since the perception of the environment and one’s role within it can be highly important for one’s behavior ( James and Jones 1974 ; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005 ), eliciting these perceptions while allowing participants to elaborate freely is valuable. Interviews lasted between 50 and 90 minutes and were recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis.

The focus is on leaders in positions of formal authority, which means people who have a managerial position. Although leadership behavior is not necessarily limited to be performed by only those in formal leadership positions, we focus on leaders as those people within organizations with such positions, because these people have extensive leadership tasks incorporated in their position—enacting leadership is expected of them. Formal leaders in universities in middle management positions are increasingly tasked with responsibilities related to strategy, accountability, and innovation as a result of shifted modes of governance. These tasks create expectations and requirements for such position holders to show leadership behavior ( Beerkens and van der Hoek 2021 /forthcoming; Pearce, Wassenaar, and Wood 2018 ). It should be noted, however, that this does not have to exclude forms of shared or distributed leadership. Such forms of leadership are present in this study, since it also includes leaders “leading leaders” and leaders with tasks delegated within a board who do not necessarily have the accompanying formal authority ( Gronn 2002 ; ‘t Hart 2014 ; Ospina 2017 ). Participants have positions as (vice) deans; directors; faculty, department, and institute board members; and chairs or coordinators of research groups and teaching programs. All participants are active academics who fulfill a managerial position for a specific term, not professional administrators.

Data collection took place from December 2017 through February 2018 at three comprehensive, research-intensive universities in the Netherlands. Within each university, participants were recruited from the faculties hosting social sciences and natural sciences. Potential participants were identified through university websites and indexed according to faculty, organizational unit, type of position, and gender. Since this study has an exploratory character, participants were invited to create a sample including a balanced variation on these characteristics and thereby variation in types of experiences. Therefore, an equal number of men and women in similar types of positions in both social and natural sciences were invited. Since the number of women in formal leadership positions in the natural sciences was comparatively small, oversampling them was required. If a participant agreed to participate, no direct colleagues from the same department or board were selected. Invitations and one reminder email were sent by email, generating an invitation acceptance of 19 out of 37. Those who declined the invitation did so with the argument of lack of time. We have no indication of bias in who accepted the invitation, as an equal number of men and women declined to participate or did not respond to the invitation. Table 1 provides an overview of participants sorted by discipline, gender, and the level of their leadership position within the university.

Interview Participants per Discipline, Gender, and Level of Leadership Position Within University ( n = 19)

Data were analyzed using the method of Thematic Analysis, based on Boyatzis’ (1998) approach. A hybrid approach was used to accommodate both inductively elaborating the variety of leadership behaviors and using sensitizing concepts of roles in the leadership behavior repertoire ( Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ) and of direction of leadership behavior ( Moore 1995 ; van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman 2016 ).

Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn (1995) distinguish a comprehensive set of leadership roles and accompanying behaviors: innovator, broker, producer, director, coordinator, monitor, facilitator, and mentor (see table 2 for brief descriptions per role). Whereas some roles involve more task-oriented behaviors, other roles concern externally oriented networking or relations-oriented coaching behaviors ( Yukl 2012 ). Since it is flexible in accommodating various directions in which the leadership behaviors are exercised, a connection to Moore’s (1995) and van den Bekerom, Torenvlied, and Akkerman (2016) distinction between leading upwards, downwards, outwards, and sidewards can be made. Therefore, this typology captures the various takes on leadership present in the public management literature and fits a repertoire perspective on leadership at the level of behavior in an encompassing way.

Leadership Roles (Derived from Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ) and Behaviors (Derived from Interviews)

Starting with open coding, an inventory of leadership behaviors was established by extracting key themes close to the wording used by participants. Co-occurring behaviors were grouped into categories of similar actions. This resulted in 13 categories of leadership behaviors. Axial coding linked these categories to the leadership roles as described by Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn (1995) . The behavior categories then give more detailed substance to the role categories, and role categories can be seen as clusters of behaviors with a similar purpose. Five behavior categories seemed to fit several leadership role categories, which were then split up into more specific categories matching the description of the role categories. During the axial coding, there appeared no substantive distinction between behavior types matching the coordinator and producer roles, which were therefore merged. This resulted in a total of seven leadership roles encompassing 18 types of leadership behaviors. This coding scheme is presented in table 2 .

The coded data have been examined using coding stripes and matrix queries to seek patterns of co-occurrence of leadership behaviors and directions in which the behaviors were exercised. The units of analysis in this process were the situations discussed by the participants, in which they experienced ambiguity and were showing leadership behavior. All analyses of the coded transcripts are performed in NVivo. This pattern-seeking has led to a categorization of leadership behavior repertoire uses that varied in their complexity, as the next section will discuss.

Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses: Empirical Illustrations

Based on the interview data, different uses of the leadership behavior repertoire were uncovered, which are illustrated below. To illicit these accounts, participants were asked to tell about situations in which they were confronted with multiple simultaneous demands that produced tension and how they acted then. In response, participants described a rich variety of leadership behaviors, showing a repertoire consisting of a range of behavioral options. Throughout the interviews, participants reported on combining several behaviors to address issues they are facing. Thereby they often need to balance several objectives, create synergies, or work in parallel on multiple issues. Participants described different types of behavior repertoire uses, that vary in terms of the number of behaviors used and the number of directions in which they operate. The variety of leadership behavior repertoire uses can be categorized in four quadrants, which is displayed in table 3 . Important to emphasize is that leadership behavior repertoire uses concern behavior modalities, approaches in dealing with leadership situations, rather than traits or characteristics of people. Leaders use those behavior modalities differently between situations.

Variation of Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses

The discussion below builds up in terms of leadership complexity (see also table 3 ): first simpler uses of the repertoire are discussed, followed by uses that involve more different types of behavior and more different directions.

Simple Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses: Few Behaviors, Few Directions

Leaders do not always use a substantial part of their leadership behavior repertoire. Only a few types of behavior directed to a single type of actor can form a leader’s response to occurring needs. Leaders discussed situations in which they dealt with a single type of actor such as their employees or were engaged in issues that involved a single task. Such examples match with how public leadership behavior is often studied, in research with the common focus on the supervisor–employee dyadic relationship. Instances of this kind can be found concerning motivating and coaching employees or managing conflict between employees. Though these examples as shown below can be classified as simple repertoire uses, it should be noted that more often than not more than one type of behavior was used. This illustrates that delineating leadership behavior in a more limited conceptualization may be too simple and may not be congruent with leaders’ practice.

For example, a participant described how he had facilitated reintegration of employees who suffered from burn-out (interview 13). He describes using behaviors of the mentor and monitor roles in downward direction: signaling and discussing burn-out of an employee to acknowledge the existence of a problem, giving the employee autonomy to come up with his/her own plan to improve the situation, discussing the plan and directing towards solutions or assistance if necessary, and monitoring and discussing progress. Another example originates with an educational director. In a mentor role, she keeps an eye to the human behind the employee, facilitating him or her to make choices about the number of hours s/he wants to work when family situations change, but at the same time ensuring that all courses can be taught and sufficient staff capacity remains, using behaviors fitting a coordinator role (interview 14). These examples show that leaders keep the interests of employees in mind while simultaneously also considering the implications for an institute and continuity of teaching programs. Yet despite concurring demands on the leader, a relatively simple repertoire use is shown.

Another type of example that appeared several times concerns the broker role in upward direction. For instance, a head of the department discussed that part of his job is to shield off his staff from new rules and administrative burden as much as possible. In the case of new digital systems being introduced by the university, he raised his voice and objections repeatedly towards the faculty and higher levels within the university. As part of this, he also participated in a review committee, gathering experiences and problems with these systems from all parts of the university, to advise the university board to change the systems and reduce the burden on employees (interview 2).

Moderately Complex Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses: Few Behaviors, Various Directions

Other times, participants described situations featuring more comprehensive uses of the leadership behavior repertoire. Leaders focus on a few behaviors fitting one role, but thereby engage a range of actors in various directions. This type of instance shows similarities with the network perspective from the literature. Examples regularly feature behaviors of a communicating and connecting kind but can take on more task-oriented behaviors in more complex contexts.

A vice-dean talked about a process to create a shared story about the newly developed strategy. The leadership behaviors mainly fall within the facilitator role, but were directed downwards, outwards, and partially also upwards. In this case, earlier efforts to engage various parts of the organization in the development of the new strategy had not been accomplished that the outcome resonated broadly and generated excitement for the future envisioned together for the strategy. She therefore organized different types of meetings with staff as well as students to discuss the important values and how the new faculty strategy would contribute to advancing these values. Seeking input, bringing perspectives together, and giving the various stakeholders a voice in creating a story brought about that a lively discussion and a sense of community around this story emerged as a basis for acting upon the strategy sustainably (interview 3).

Other illustrations of this quadrant feature participants who are active in collaborations across organizational boundaries - both internal boundaries within the university and outward boundaries. An example comes from a research group leader who also acts as chair of a university-wide multidisciplinary network. In her work for this network, she talks about using leadership behaviors fitting the broker role in upward, sideward, and downward directions. As chair of this network, this participant works on setting up collaborative teaching modules as well as integrating the network’s focal theme within existing programs at all faculties. This means that she is engaged a lot in talking to deans, department and education directors, and peers throughout the university to explain the relevance of incorporating the theme within university teaching, asking them to participate and allocate resources within their programs to develop such education, and coordinating between participating programs and teachers on the work floor. Bargaining is part of this process, as well as establishing commitment from the university board to leverage it in those negotiations. Keeping in touch and following up with all stakeholders in the various directions, representing interests, cooperating, and spotting opportunities all fit this broker role, but takes different shapes dependent on which type of actors in which direction she engages with (interview 16).

Moderately Complex Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses: Various Behaviors, Few Directions

A similar yet different version of the more comprehensive repertoire use is found when leaders combine a variety of behaviors of multiple roles, but only use them in one direction. Such behavior repertoire uses share with much of the literature that leadership is exercised in relation to a single type of stakeholder. It differs, however, by involving a combination of diverse behaviors, that emphasizes that leaders draw on multiple roles in these relationships.

An illustration is given by a head of department, whose department went through turbulent times and faced declining revenues and austerity measures from the faculty. She described her leadership in keeping the department afloat in terms of various behaviors matching the director, facilitator, and broker roles directed downwards at the staff working in the department. Initially, she had to get the change process in motion, which meant that she stressed the urgency of the problem and the need to take action for survival. Moreover, she stepped in to mediate and resolve conflict to get resistant staff members on board. This required organizing numerous meetings, having conversations with people separately, explaining the situation, and convincing the staff to make changes to the program. Besides giving input, she sought perspectives and ideas of the staff to solve the problems, giving them the opportunity to reshape the program along their expertise and thereby also create ownership of the community. Still, as head of the department, she made the conditions clear in order to reach the goal of solving the financial problems. Throughout the process, she worked on building social cohesion, trust, and a sense of collective ownership of the department, not only through participatory decision-making but also by organizing social activities and creating physical signs of community (a picture wall, for instance) (interview 19).

A further example of this type of repertoire use is provided by an educational director, who discusses how he works on getting the teaching program staffed and ensures educational quality. To plan all courses and allocate staff, he uses a model that specifies how many hours are available to fulfill tasks. In this way, he provides transparency to his colleagues. When a teacher complains about their tasks and the time available, and that it would not be fair, he can use the model to show what needs to be done in a year and how all colleagues contribute to that. Besides his coordinator and monitor role behaviors, he also draws on mentor role behaviors, to make sure that supporting arrangements are in place for new teachers, for instance, training and assistance, and asking what tasks people would like to do and how he can help them. Building shared ownership by involving staff in discussions and asking them for plans to improve educational quality characterize his facilitator role (interview 7).

Complex Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses: Various Behaviors, Various Directions

Lastly, complex combinations of leadership behavior repertoire options are commonly used. Leaders made use of multiple behaviors and engaged with actors in various directions. Cases that involve strategy and organizational change are commonly at the heart of such examples. All participants shared the conviction and experience that strategies, plans for change, and important decisions should not be made by a leader alone, but instead should be developed together with their staff. This is important within the complex ambiguous contexts of many public organizations, because leaders lead professionals who have strong intrinsic motivation and a high level of expertise, while at the same time, many leaders still participate—like their staff—in the primary process like a “primus inter pares.”

Exemplary for a complex leadership behavior repertoire use is a head of department who elaborated on a process of formulating a new strategy for his department. He combined the innovator, broker, facilitator, and director roles and thereby worked downwards and upwards. Taking initiative, seeking and giving input, setting boundary conditions, delegating tasks and giving autonomy to his staff within these limits, overseeing but not directing the process, creating engagement, representing interests to the faculty board and financial department, and setting direction by making the final decisions based on input from the bottom-up process were combined in this process. New plans were being developed, while at the same time he started preparing for implementation. This example also illustrates the relational character of leadership spanning multiple organizational levels and working with actors in multiple directions. The participant facilitated employees within his institute to create bottom-up plans and influenced them by providing boundary conditions, while at the same time, influencing stakeholders higher up in the organization to be able to implement the new plans without delay or difficulties (interview 18).

Another illustrative case is provided by an educational director, who initiated, developed, and realized a new international Bachelor program. She combined innovator, facilitator, monitor, and director role behaviors in various directions: downwards, sidewards, and outwards. Based on her analysis of developments in the educational environment, staff composition, and potential for future thriving, this educational director took the initiative to start talking about creating a new program. Together with coordinating and policy staff, she made sure the financial conditions would allow this initiative and she started seeking input from teaching staff in various rounds and through diverse channels. The process was intentionally participatory and efforts were made to ensure transparent communication with staff members. In this way, shared ownership and support for the program were created to make it a success. Additionally, in the logistical developments, she has sought help and cooperation with colleagues of other disciplines within the university, to learn from each other and unite their interests (interview 10).

Towards a Research Agenda

The illustrated uses of the leadership behavior repertoire give rise to questions how this perspective can contribute to ongoing theorizing and research. This section outlines research directions that seem particularly fruitful to continue when conceptualizing leadership behavior as a repertoire. Moreover, several methodological suggestions to make progress along those substantive lines are discussed.

Leadership Behavior Repertoire Uses in Relation to Context

In line with most leadership research, we have found between-person variation: between participants, the emphasis on certain types of behavior differs. Whereas some participants seem to put their role as director more central, others more often act as facilitators or brokers. Nevertheless, all participants take on multiple roles and work in various directions, which makes clear that characterizing a leader by their most prominent style is too simplistic. Possibly of more theoretical importance then is the within-person variation. The same participant can show different uses of the repertoire in varying situations. Several interviewees explicitly state that using the same “recipe” in all situations is not helpful, that instead, it is necessary to have sensitivity to contextual variation and use various approaches adapted to the situation. Such within-person variation of leadership behavior implies that an adaptation process is ongoing and underlines the importance of looking at leadership integrally and contextually.

Increasing our understanding of how leadership itself takes shape is all the more important, because characteristics of the context in which leaders operate present challenges—not the least in public organizations. Leaders need to balance multiple needs from their environment while being constrained by the complex hierarchical structures that divide formal authority between leaders in different positions ( Getha-Taylor et al. 2011 ; Groeneveld and Van de Walle 2011 ). Simultaneously, leadership is of growing importance in the pursuit of organizational goals ( Shamir 1999 ). So far, however, this question is largely overlooked ( Porter and McLaughlin 2006 ; cf. Schmidt and Groeneveld 2021 ; cf. Stoker, Garretsen, and Soudis 2019 ). Though it is debated to what extent the public sector is special, it is widely acknowledged that various aspects of publicness and the political context impact on organizational structures and processes amongst which leadership takes shape ( ‘t Hart 2014 ; Pollitt 2013 ). Adopting a repertoire conceptualization of leadership behavior and continuing within-person focused research can further stimulate systematic investigation of the impact of context factors on leadership.

Moving the focus from leadership of persons to leadership in situations helps disentangling leadership’s complexity while integrating context in our understanding of leadership. Thereby we build on and set a step beyond recent work of Pedersen et al. (2019) and Kramer et al. (2019) . Leaders could be thought of as being sensitive to contextual variations between situations and consequently, that such context sensitivity translates into context-sensitive behavior: when a leader perceives the situation to be different, the behavior deemed appropriate would co-vary. 1 A repertoire conceptualization can help to make this visible. It can then be argued that such context sensitivity is connected to a behavioral response based on contextual adaptation ( Hooijberg 1996 ; Van der Hoek, Beerkens, and Groeneveld 2021 ). It is worthwhile to investigate the relationship between contextual needs and a leader’s individual skills, capacity, and preferences and what that means for how the repertoire is used. Follow-up studies should conceptualize and operationalize context variables specifically to avoid vague and irrelevant explanations and make situational variation meaningful.

Leadership Repertoire Uses in Relation to Outcomes

Another step can be made by investigating how leadership behavior seen from this repertoire perspective relates to other organizational phenomena. In the existing literature, many studies show the effects of isolated parts of leadership on performance and employee attitudes (see Vogel and Masal 2015 ). From a repertoire perspective, leaders can substitute and compensate their behaviors, and they prioritize their roles and behaviors differently (possibly) depending on the context. As Van der Hoek, Beerkens, and Groeneveld (2021) show, for example, leaders are likely to consolidate their behaviors when ambiguity increases. We have observed various shapes that the repertoire can take, but it would be worthwhile to investigate, too, whether those shapes have different impacts on outcome variables and under which conditions those relationships exist.

It has been found that leaders can use various approaches to be effective ( Pedersen et al. 2019 ) and leadership is most effective when leaders draw on the variety of options of the repertoire ( Denison, Hooijberg, and Quinn 1995 ; Havermans et al. 2015 ; Hooijberg 1996 ). Using the repertoire’s full range of options makes that leaders can match the diversity of issues they are addressing with suitable action, as the opportunities to create a fit between demands and response increase. Also in research on ambidexterity of leaders, it was found that effectiveness to fulfill various requirements was enhanced when leaders draw on a range of different behaviors ( Mom, Fourné, and Jansen 2015 ). Moreover, as Smith’s (2014) study shows, the pattern of behavior and decisions over a longer stretch of time may have more important consequences for organizational outcomes than single actions and decisions. A repertoire conceptualization of leadership facilitates that combinations of behavior with their combined impact are highlighted and can be evaluated.

Operationalization of the Leadership Behavior Repertoire

Our analysis has focused on the variety within leadership behavior repertoire uses. Nevertheless, variety is only one perspective on this complexity. Not only which behaviors are used and in which directions, but a temporal lens to study repertoires can also add supplementary insights. Firstly, timing of the use of the repertoire’s elements can vary. Leaders can undertake various actions in parallel, while at other times the different actions are more sequential. Moreover, the moment when leaders decide to start, stop or change their approach can differ. Also delaying or waiting involve this temporal factor. Our interview participants gave examples that indicate variation in timing. Another way in which we can learn more about the leadership behavior repertoire is by considering the duration and intensity of behaviors. Whereas leaders may spend only a single instance of short time on some activities, others may require full attention for either a longer or shorter time, or may be always ongoing in a monitoring fashion.

Several authors have called for attention for temporal factors such as timing, pace, rhythm, cycles, ordering, and trends in the study of organizational behavior (e.g., Ancona et al. 2001 ; Castillo and Trinh 2018 ; Johns 2006 ) and public management ( Oberfield 2014a ; O’Toole and Meier 1999 ; Pollitt 2008 ), though still very few empirical studies in public management have explicitly addressed this issue (e.g., Oberfield 2014a , 2014b ). By taking up a repertoire perspective to conceptualize leadership, more nuanced differences connected to subtle time variables could be illuminated.

Internal Dynamics of the Leadership Behavior Repertoire

Besides further developing the operationalization of the leadership behavior repertoire, the internal dynamics of the repertoire can be unpacked. Not only the elements of the repertoire themselves and how we look at them, but also how they are combined and balanced can be disentangled for deeper insights. Understanding why leaders use their repertoire as they do, how they combine and balance the various elements, and why so, helps to untangle the intricacies of the complexity of the leadership behavior repertoire. As referred to before, the internal dynamics may cause differential effects than when a single type of leadership is examined.

One relevant aspect concerns the extent to which leaders are on the one hand intentional, strategic, and proactive in choosing their leadership behavior, or reactive and habitual on the other hand ( Boyne and Walker 2004 ; Crant 2000 ; Miles and Snow 1978 ). Based on some indications in our data, variation exists in this respect. Sometimes leaders take a proactive approach and choose behaviors strategically to advance their goals. Building on findings by Havermans et al. (2015) , intentional switching and combining of various leadership behaviors can be expected. Other times, leadership behavior becomes a matter of reactively responding to what is thrown at a leader and defaulting to preferred styles.

Explanatory factors at the level of the leader may be relevant to consider. One way to understand such differences concerning the combinations leaders make, relates to the breadth of repertoire options available to them. In case leaders are aware of a large number of behavioral strategies they could adopt and have the skills to use them, this may lead to more varied repertoire uses and more variation between situations. On the other hand, having knowledge and skills of only a few behavioral options, leaders may be more inclined to use the same and a limited repertoire. How this relates to length of tenure in a position or experience in leadership roles more generally could be examined. A second explanation could be found in how leaders perceive their room for maneuver. Feeling in control or in the position to frame issues may help to make such conscious strategic combinations. Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of demands or in a position of putting out fires, however, may put leaders under pressure to forgo proactive strategic behavior.

Methodological Recommendations

To pursue these substantive avenues for continued study, a number of methodological suggestions can be made that seem particularly suitable when using a repertoire conceptualization of leadership behavior.

Experimental methods are strongly encouraged and increasingly used in the field (e.g., Blom-Hansen, Morton, and Serritzlew 2015 ; Jacobsen and Andersen 2015 ). Experimental designs can be used to assess the extent to which leaders adapt their leadership behavior to context. The controlled design can systematically build on insights from rich literature about the public sector context as well as from research in the contingency tradition. By manipulating contextual variation in experimental tasks or vignettes ( Atzmüller and Steiner 2010 ; Barter and Renold 1999 ; Belle and Cantarelli 2018 ; Podsakoff and Podsakoff 2019 ), the specific effect of context on leadership behavior can be tested. A repertoire conceptualization may then reveal differentiation in how context factors influence leadership behavior. Since experimental conditions can be designed by the researcher, numerous potentially relevant contextual dimensions discussed in public management research can be investigated on their effects on leadership behavior repertoire uses. If participants are confronted with multiple manipulations each, within-person variation and adaptation can be examined ( Van der Hoek, Beerkens, and Groeneveld 2021 ).

Another strategy to study leadership repertoires is using event sampling methods ( Bolger, Davis, and Raffaeli 2003 ; Kelemen, Matthews, and Breevaart 2020 ; Ohly et al. 2010 ). These methods are based on within-person variation over time, whereby study participants can be asked to report their leadership behavior at various points in time or after specified events occur. In addition, they can be asked to provide information about the context and situation in which this leadership behavior was used as well as about results. Both quantitative multilevel designs and qualitative diary studies could each contribute new insights: hypothesized patterns can be assessed or perceptions of and considerations in various situations can be disentangled. Therefore, event sampling methods can be used to test whether leaders adapt their leadership behavior to changing situations. Secondly, this method offers opportunities to learn more about timing of changes in the repertoire use and reasons for doing so.

Finally, ethnographic methods such as shadowing and participant observation are suitable to study subtle differences in meaning-giving and leadership behavior repertoire use ( Alvesson 1996 ; Geertz 1973 ; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005 ). Observing leaders in various types of situations and asking questions related to those observations can give better insights in leaders’ interpretations of the context and their considerations when responding to a situation. In this way, the interaction between situational context and personal preferences and skills related to their repertoire can be studied. The balancing of different behavioral strategies by leaders can then be illuminated. This could add to develop the operationalization of the leadership repertoire as well as the understanding of its internal dynamics. Moreover, such methods are particularly useful to connect leaders’ own intentions of their leadership behavior to the perceptions of those around them to whom this behavior is directed. Since self-other disagreement is common in the study of leadership behavior ( Vogel and Kroll 2019 ), combining self-reported accounts with accounts of others can stimulate the repertoire’s validity if confirmed.

We see more of leadership when we look at the leadership behavior repertoire used in situations. Coaching, motivating, planning, solving problems should not be seen as stand-alone behaviors of a leader; instead, such actions are taken at the backdrop of and are impacted by the overall task of leading an organization, which involves many more leadership behaviors. This regularly evokes a more complex leadership repertoire use. Furthermore, the structures that divide authority of leaders and thereby make them interdependent, bring along that leadership behavior does not only comprise supervising employees or leading downwards, but that 360-degree action is frequently required. The relational character of leadership is omnipresent in such complex environments. Leaders have to work in different directions and need to switch their strategies and combine various types of leadership behavior to be able to influence and facilitate.

There are always trade-offs when defining a good concept, parsimony and depth being one of them in this case, and the utility for theory is the most important criterion when choosing the best concept ( Gerring 1999 ). In-depth studies on specific leadership elements have provided valuable evidence on the nature of certain behaviors, and their effects on various organizational outcomes. As a limitation, they ignore a symbiotic relationship between different behaviors. While more comprehensive, the repertoire approach has its own challenges, though. Due to its comprehensiveness, delineation of the concept as well as its operationalization and use in empirical studies is more complex.

The fragmentation of research in different, largely non-communicating parts of the literature may be developing a blind spot for the study of leadership behavior of individuals in public organizations: though it may describe the real world well in relatively simple situations, it prevents studying leadership behavior in a manner that covers the comprehensiveness of leadership in more complex situations common in public organizations. This study provides support for the importance of an integral approach that examines the combination of various leadership behaviors at the individual level in public management, because the ambiguous context of many public leaders forces them to draw on a broad repertoire of behaviors. Learning how leaders vary, combine, and balance their behavioral strategies is then essential, as it can provide further insights into obstacles and openings of effective leadership. The identified directions could be a guide for future research in this endeavor.

The premise of context sensitivity underlies research on contingency theory (e.g., Aldrich 1979 ; Donaldson 2001 ; Fiedler 1967 ; Lawrence and Lorsch 1967 ; Perrow 1970 ) and situational leadership (e.g., Graef 1997 ; Thompson and Vecchio 2009 ; Yukl 2008 ), though such studies generally focus on organizational structure or effectiveness as dependent on leadership or organizations’ external environment. Situational leadership theory ( Graef 1997 ; Thompson and Vecchio 2009 ; Yukl 2008 ) sees leadership itself as dependent on context, but specifically focuses on employees’ task maturity rather than a broader view of organizational context factors and narrows leadership to motivating subordinates.

- Can you tell me what it means to be [director/dean/board member/project leader] within this [department/institute/faculty] (tasks/running issues and projects)?

Leadership role: How do you see your role as […]?

- What do you find hard about your role as […]? Can you tell about this in relation to a particular issue or event in which this featured. What did make that difficult?

- Do you experience dilemmas in your role as […]? Have you experienced moments where different things were hard to reconcile? Where did that tension come from?

- Do you experience dilemmas between your roles as […] and […]?

- You have different tasks and roles. How do you combine those (simultaneously)?

Ambiguity needs: Which needs/expectations do you encounter in your role as […]?

- Where do those needs originate from? Can you tell about this in relation to a particular issue or event in which this featured.

- What did you do then in that situation?

- Do you always do this in the same way, or is it dependent on the situation?

- What made you choose this approach?

Do you face:

Goals that allow room for multiple interpretations?

Working on both innovation/change as optimization/stability?

Complexity and dynamism in the environment of your [department/institute/faculty/group]?

- Do you experience tension here? Example? Where did that tension stem from?

- How did you deal with it?

As a last question for this interview: Could we go through your last week, see how the things you talked about show in how you spend your time?

- What do you mean by […]?

- Can you give an example of that (of last week/month)?

- What did you do then?

- Can you tell more specifically which actions you undertook to do that?

- Can you take me along in the process of […], how that went, what you were thinking?

- What did you find difficult about that?

- How did you do that?

- Can you elaborate?

- Have you missed a topic/did we not discuss something that you would like to bring to my attention?

- Did you participate in leadership training?

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The Path Is the Goal: How Transformational Leaders Enhance Followers’ Job Attitudes and Proactive Behavior

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.

Introduction

Although the setting of goals has been emphasized to be one of the most important tasks of leaders (e.g., Tett et al., 2000 ), goals and leadership have commonly been considered from two relatively independent research perspectives (cf. Berson et al., 2015 ). In the field of goal research many efforts centered on the setting of goals in organizational contexts. As a core finding, a multitude of studies (for an overview: Locke and Latham, 2002 ) revealed that setting specific and moderately difficult goals results in increases of an individual’s performance as such goals direct one’s attention, induce greater effort, enhance one’s persistence, and elicit the use of task-related knowledge and strategies ( Locke and Latham, 2002 ). Studies further showed that the strength of this association depends on certain goal attributes, an individual’s self-efficacy beliefs, as well as feedback on and the complexity of the task. Apart from its impact on an individual’s job performance and work motivation, goal setting is also an important determinant of one’s self-regulation ( Latham and Locke, 1991 ). Their self-regulative function results as specific and difficult goals point out a discrepancy between a current and a future state and clarify the acceptable level of performance ( Latham and Locke, 1991 ). Goals, however, may not only be set by another person but also by an individual him-/herself. Personal goals and their pursuit have been another line of interest for goal researchers (e.g., Emmons, 1986 ; Brunstein, 1993 ). In the field of leadership research, goals have initially been assigned a dominant role in those conceptions, which highlight a leader’s task orientation. Task-oriented leaders focus on getting their work done and completing assignments ( Bass, 1990 ). Such leaders therefore emphasize goals, foster their achievement, and monitor followers’ goal pursuit. In this regard, goals may be seen as a means to exert control in leader-follower interactions.

Instead of viewing the assignment of goals as a way to monitor followers, in the present study, we embed the goal setting of leaders into the context of motivating and enabling subordinates. In so doing, we concentrate on the construct of transformational leadership, as transformational leaders (TLs) not only have high performance expectations ( Bass, 1985 ), but rather inspire and empower their subordinates ( Bass and Riggio, 2006 ). In motivating and enabling followers, goals have variously been assigned a central role in the theory of transformational leadership (e.g., Shamir et al., 1993 ; Conger and Kanungo, 1998 ). Therefore, a goal-perspective to transformational leadership is straightforward.

Given that setting goals is a common leadership task ( Tett et al., 2000 ), it is indispensable to incorporate well-founded knowledge accumulated in the field of goal research into study efforts on effective leadership. Only if we consider both research domains jointly, we can get the best picture possible of how leaders influence followers and the way they pursue the goals these leaders set. Intertwining findings and theoretical assumptions on goal setting, self-regulative goal pursuit, and personal goals with empirical evidence and theorizing on transformational leadership, we assume TLs to foster followers’ perception of organizational goals to be important and attainable, and by these means, to increase their job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior. That way, the present study helps in bringing together the different streams of research and to generalize extant evidence on assigned and personal goals to the goal setting within leader-follower-interactions. In so doing, our study investigates fundamental assumptions on the inner workings of transformational leadership for which empirical evidence is yet scarce. As such, the present work also contributes to further substantiating theoretically derived mechanisms of transformational leadership and thus to our understanding of how these leaders exert their extraordinary influence on followers.

Motivating and Enabling Employees: The Transformational Leadership Approach

TLs motivate followers to commit themselves to organizational objectives and to realize performance outcomes, which exceed beyond expectations. According to Bass (1985) , leaders accomplish this process of motivating and transforming followers by (1) heightening their awareness of the importance and value of designated goals, (2) encouraging them to transcend self-interests for the good of the organization or team, and (3) activating their higher order needs as TLs articulate an inspiring vision and act as role models in attaining the vision. More specifically, TLs are able to ideally influence subordinates due to their exceptional charisma and prompt followers to personally identify with them ( Bass, 1985 ). Based on this emotional attachment, TLs instill within followers the desire to emulate their leaders and thus become followers’ role models. TLs envision an appealing future goal state for their team or the entire organization and express confidence in followers’ abilities to attain this higher-order goal ( Bass, 1985 ). By this means, they inspirationally motivate followers to achieve more than expected. As they tie the ideological vision to the collective’s future, TLs foster the acceptance of group goals and enhance the cooperation within teams ( Podsakoff et al., 1990 ). Besides, they intellectually stimulate followers to question their way of working and to take on new perspectives increasing subordinates’ awareness of problems that way ( Podsakoff et al., 1990 ). TLs clearly express the high performance demands they have and expect excellence and high quality work from followers ( Podsakoff et al., 1990 ). Concurrently, they also attend to followers’ needs, listen to their particular concerns, and are individually considerate toward them ( Bass, 1985 ).

After the key behaviors used to transform and motivate followers had been identified, Conger and Kanungo (1998) claimed that more insights into the process of motivating and transforming followers were needed and called for a more processual perspective on transformational leadership. They developed a three-stage model, which aimed at illustrating how TLs transform subordinates and move them from an existing present state toward some future state. According to this model, TLs first examine the current situation at work and its surrounding environment. In this initial stage, they actively search the status quo for existing or potential shortcomings. Based on the deficiencies they identify, goals are then derived, formulated, and conveyed in the second stage. By articulating a very discrepant and idealized goal, TLs provide a sense of challenge and a motivating force for change to their followers ( Conger, 1999 ). In the final stage, they build trust in the goals they disseminate and demonstrate how these goals can be attained. The model thus highlights the communication and implementation of a vision or goal as a key mechanism of transformational leadership.

Goal Setting, Self-Regulation, and Personal Goals

In the work context, goals may help to predict, explicate, and affect an employee’s job performance ( Locke and Latham, 2002 ). By setting followers’ goals, leaders create a discrepancy between a current situation and a future state and, with regard to work-related tasks, emphasize what constitutes an adequate level of performance. That way, they provide a sense of purpose, which coordinates and guides their followers’ action ( Latham and Locke, 1991 ).

After a goal is communicated or set, leaders often do not have direct control over their subordinates’ goal pursuit anymore and followers have to plan and organize the goal striving process autonomously. In order to attain organizational goals, employees therefore have to be able to self-regulate at work. Traditionally, self-regulation is defined as processes that “enable an individual to guide his/her goal-directed activities over time and across changing circumstances (contexts), [… including the] modulation of thought, affect, behavior, or attention” ( Karoly, 1993 , p. 25). This definition points out that in the process of self-regulation, goals are an essential component ( Vancouver, 2000 ). Moreover, it describes self-regulation as a volitional process of translating the goals, which have been set into action. In a series of experiments, Oettingen et al. (2001) identified three self-regulatory thought processes, which are of relevance within an autonomous goal setting process: mentally contrasting the desired future with reality, dwelling on negative aspects of the current reality, and indulging in the desired future. The authors observed that as a function of these three self-regulatory thoughts, feelings of identification with the goal, expectations of success, and effortful goal striving result.

Self-regulated goal striving is also addressed in the field of personal goal research. Personal goals are set by an individual him-/herself and are therefore person-specific. Models of personal goal pursuit emphasize the personal significance and uniqueness of these goals and acknowledge the autonomy and self-determination during the goal striving process (e.g., Emmons, 1986 ; Brunstein, 1993 ). Knowledge gathered in the domain of personal goals may give valuable insights into the way TLs facilitate their followers’ goal pursuit. As TLs intertwine the goals they set with followers’ self-concepts ( Shamir et al., 1993 ) and lead them to internalize these goals ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ), subordinates perceive these goals to be highly self-consistent ( Shamir et al., 1993 ) and feel goal-directed actions to be driven by personally held values ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ). TLs hence seem to be able to turn organizational goals into followers’ personal goals. According to the personal goal model of well-being (for an overview: Brunstein et al., 1999 ), which is well-established in the field of personal goal research, there are two decisive factors that determine one’s success in pursuing personal goals as well as the subjective well-being of the goal striver: the valence followers attach to the goals and the degree to which they perceive the goals to be attainable. Whereas a goal’s importance increases one’s determination in pursuing the goals ( Maier and Brunstein, 2001 ), the evaluation of a goal to be attainable first leads individuals to decide to pursue that goal ( Heckhausen and Kuhl, 1985 ). Maier and Brunstein (2001) adapted this model to the work domain and report evidence, which suggests that the two goal attributes account for changes in job satisfaction and organizational commitment. They conclude that “to achieve well-being and avoid distress, it is important for individuals to have both a strong sense of commitment to valued goals and a life situation that provides favorable conditions to materialize these goals” ( Maier and Brunstein, 2001 , p. 1035).

Combining self-regulation theory and the personal goal model, one can assume that the goal attributes highlighted in the personal goal model result from the self-regulatory processes Oettingen et al. (2001) found to be related to an autonomous goal striving. Goal importance and goal attainability may thus be considered indicators of an autonomous goal pursuit regardless of whether the goal had been set by a leader or by the follower him-/herself. If we transfer these considerations to the organizational goal setting process, we assume that in order to facilitate followers’ goal pursuit, leaders have to enhance their followers’ evaluation of the goal’s importance and attainability.

Transformational Leaders as Facilitators of the Goal Pursuit of Employees

Although theoretically the effectiveness of transformational leadership has widely been ascribed to its impact on followers’ perception of organizational goals, empirically this relation experienced far less attention. Those studies which indeed focused on goal attributes found transformational leadership to positively relate to followers’ evaluation of the goal’s specificity and difficulty ( Whittington et al., 2004 ; Bronkhorst et al., 2015 ), as well as its clarity ( Wright et al., 2012 ). Followers of TLs further rated organizational goals to be more consistent with their own values and interests ( Bono and Judge, 2003 ) and showed a higher agreement with their leaders on strategic goals ( Berson and Avolio, 2004 ). On the team level, transformational leadership was associated with higher levels of team goal commitment ( Chi et al., 2011 ) and a higher congruence with regard to the importance team members attach to the goals ( Colbert et al., 2008 ).

In line with our reasoning on the value of a goal’s importance and attainability in an autonomous goal accomplishment, Latham and Locke (1991) stated that leaders can play a significant role in facilitating their followers’ goal pursuit by convincing them that the goals are both important and attainable. In the present study, we therefore concentrate on these goal attributes and their relation to transformational leadership.

Empirically, transformational leadership has already been related to a goal’s importance ( Colbert et al., 2008 ). This study, though, focused on the degree of goal importance congruence among team members. Finer-grained analyses, however, suggested that rather than the degree of congruence it is an individual’s goal importance perception as such which positively relates to transformational leadership and followers’ job-related attitudes. To substantiate these initial findings and hence theoretical assumptions on the mechanisms of transformational leadership, followers’ individual evaluations of a goal’s importance have to be further examined in the context of these leadership behaviors. Goal clarity, specificity, or difficulty have also been studied with regard to transformational leadership ( Wright et al., 2012 ; Bronkhorst et al., 2015 ). Besides, this leadership style has been shown to be closely associated with followers’ broader feeling of having the ability to perform successfully ( Kark et al., 2003 ). However, irrespective of the central role it has been assigned theoretically, evidence on the impact of transformational leadership on followers’ perception of a specific goal’s attainability is yet missing. Studies linking transformational leadership and followers’ perception of a goal’s importance and attainability may thus give further evidence-based insides into the process of how TLs transform followers and motivate them to achieve more than expected beyond existing research.

Transformational Leadership and Goal Importance

Goal importance refers to the significance an individual assigns to a certain goal and its achievement relative to other work- or non-work-related goals ( Hollenbeck and Williams, 1987 ). It indicates how closely one regulates this goal compared to other goals ( Powers, 1978 ). Goal importance is a significant driver of an individual’s goal commitment ( Locke and Latham, 2002 ), and, as such, aligns one’s feelings and actions to the accomplishment of the specific goal ( Hollenbeck and Klein, 1987 ). As a result, people extend their effort and invest more time even if they face difficulties or obstacles during the goal pursuit. In sum, goal importance is a significant determinant of one’s motivation to achieve certain goals ( Bandura, 1997 ). For this reason, it is of major interest to figure out leadership techniques, which help to increase followers’ perception of an organizational goal’s importance.

In the very beginning, researchers argued that supervisors’ legitimate authority to assign goals or their physical presence was sufficient to create commitment to and raise a goal’s importance ( Ronan et al., 1973 ). Later, Latham and Saari (1979) showed that a supportive leadership style increased the importance attached to goals and that providing a rationale for the goal also functioned as a facilitator (“tell and sell” style; Locke et al., 1988 ). Moreover, if leaders communicate an inspiring vision they may enhance the attractiveness of attaining a certain goal and accentuate its importance ( Berson and Avolio, 2004 ). Vision articulation, rationales, and a supportive leadership style seem to foster followers’ goal acceptance by making them more likely to see the consequences of goal attainment as rewarding or favorable ( Locke and Latham, 2002 ). In addition, goals gain in importance if followers are involved in the goal setting process. Under this condition, they own the goals agreed upon ( Locke and Latham, 2002 ). Sheldon et al. (2002) developed a goal intervention program, which aimed at increasing one’s sense of ownership. They asked participants to reflect upon the meaningfulness of goals and to consider the core values these goals express (“Own the goal” strategy). Besides, participants were motivated to reflect upon the longer-term goals their current goals serve (“Remember the big picture” strategy). These strategies as well as the leadership attributes, which have been found to strengthen followers’ perception of a goal’s importance, closely match the behaviors TLs use in leading. TLs articulate an ideological vision of an attractive future goal state and frame the work in terms of collectively approved values ( Shamir et al., 1993 ). That way, they provide a meaningful and stimulating rationale for the work to be done but also transform followers’ beliefs and values ( Conger and Kanungo, 1998 ). By aligning followers’ values to the higher-order mission they articulate, TLs create a purpose in work that exceeds beyond extrinsic outcomes ( Arnold et al., 2007 ) and increase the meaningfulness of goal accomplishment ( Shamir et al., 1993 ). Besides strengthening the importance of organizational goals via their alignment to an ideological vision, TLs also foster followers’ sense of ownership by involving them in important organizational decisions. In so doing, TLs delegate responsibilities, are open to followers’ ideas and reasoning, and consider their needs in leading ( Avolio et al., 1991 ).

As TLs present work and especially organizational goals in terms of a higher-order vision and link them to subordinates’ values but also grant subordinates responsibility during the goal pursuit, we assume followers to perceive the goals their TLs set to be more important.

Hypothesis 1: We suggest that the more transformational followers perceive their supervisors to lead, the higher the importance they attach to the organizational goals set by or agreed upon with these leaders.

Transformational Leadership and Goal Attainability

Goal setting theory states that for goals to be motivational, they have to be specific and challenging but yet attainable ( Locke and Latham, 1990 , 2002 ). Goal attainability indicates how favorable or unfavorable goal strivers perceive external conditions with respect to their goal progress. If an individual perceives a goal to be attainable, he/she has various opportunities to strive toward the goal, has control over the goal striving process, and receives goal-related support from his/her social network ( Brunstein, 1993 ). Accordingly, leaders have three levers to adjust in order to make goals more attainable: opportunities, control, and support.

Social support is an important resource in facilitating employees’ work and enhancing their work attitudes (e.g., Hochwarter et al., 1999 ; Viswesvaran et al., 1999 ). In a meta-analysis, Ng and Sorensen (2008) showed that compared to colleagues or the organization as a whole, supervisors are the most valuable source of social support. This value of supervisory support is also acknowledged by the theory of transformational leadership. One of its key components, individualized consideration, includes behaviors such as encouraging followers, acting as their coaches or mentors, and being caring and nurturing ( Bass and Avolio, 1994 ; Conger and Kanungo, 1998 ). Besides, TLs demonstrate how goals may be attained ( Conger, 1999 ). By providing this kind of social and instrumental support, TLs are likely to positively affect followers’ perception of being able to attain the goals set by their leaders. TLs foster each follower’s personal and professional development ( Bass and Avolio, 1994 ) and promote their growth, independence, and empowerment ( Bass, 1985 ; Kark et al., 2003 ). To achieve these ends, they use empowering leadership behaviors such as delegating responsibilities and enabling employees to make important decisions, providing resources, and background information about organizational processes, as well as enhancing followers’ capacity to think and question familiar ways of working ultimately raising followers’ self-efficacy beliefs that way ( Avolio et al., 1991 ; Menon, 2001 ; Dvir et al., 2002 ; Kark et al., 2003 ). Self-effective and empowered persons believe in their capability to perform successfully, have a sense of having choice in initiating and regulating actions, and are able to influence outcomes at work ( Spreitzer, 1995 ). As such, these followers ought to feel a higher degree of control with regard to their goal striving. Along with the autonomy they grant, the resources they provide, and the error culture they propagate, the intellectual stimulation TLs practice leads followers to also see and explore new ways of approaching their jobs and completing their tasks ( Peng et al., 2016 ). This motivation to rethink the way they pursue organizational goals likely makes followers aware of new and different opportunities they have in striving toward these goals.

Transformational leaders are hence able to positively impact all three levers leaders may adjust in order to increase followers’ perception of being able to attain their organization’s goals. Therefore, we assume a positive association between transformational leadership and followers’ attainability evaluation of the goals, which had been set by or agreed upon with these leaders.

Hypothesis 2: We suggest that the more transformational followers perceive their supervisors to lead, the higher the attainability they ascribe to the organizational goals set by or agreed upon with these leaders.

Transformational Leadership, Goal Attributes, and Followers’ Job Attitudes and Performance

We were not only interested in the question whether TLs are able to facilitate their followers’ goal pursuit but also in showing that this process of motivating and enabling makes a particular contribution to an organization’s functioning. An extant body of meta-analytic evidence shows that TLs substantially influence their subordinates’ job attitudes, motivation, performance, and proactive behavior at work ( Fuller et al., 1996 ; Lowe et al., 1996 ; Judge and Piccolo, 2004 ; Wang et al., 2011 ). Out of the multitude of possible outcomes, we drew on indicators of successful organizational adaptation, as today’s changing work environments and competitive market situation require organizations to easily and quickly adapt to new challenges ( Gordon and Yukl, 2004 ). Specifically, we examined followers’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior for indicating an employee’s willingness to accept new challenges in the future ( Bateman and Crant, 1993 ; Cordery et al., 1993 ; Yousef, 2000 ).

Previous research also confirmed a clear link between the two goal attributes importance and attainability and followers’ affective job attitudes as well as their performance (e.g., Lee et al., 1991 ; Maier and Brunstein, 2001 ; Locke and Latham, 2002 ). In line with these findings, we assume that TLs facilitate their followers’ goal pursuit process and exert their positive influence on work attitudes and proactive behavior by increasing followers’ perception of the importance and attainability of organizational goals.

Hypothesis 3: We suggest that followers’ evaluations of the organizational goal attributes importance and attainability jointly mediate the relationship between their perception of their leaders’ transformational leadership behavior and (a) their job satisfaction, (b) organizational commitment, and (c) proactive behavior.

Materials and Methods

Procedures and participants.

In order to test our hypotheses, we collected data via an online questionnaire at two measurement occasions. At T1, participants were asked to evaluate their leader’s leadership behavior and to list three organizational goals. For each of these goals, participants then indicated its importance and attainability. Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior were assessed at the second measurement occasion, which was scheduled 4 weeks after the first measures had been taken. We chose this time lag since influences of leadership behavior on employees’ well-being are more likely to be detected within a short than within a long period of time ( van Dierendonck et al., 2004 ). Data sets were matched based on a pre-structured ten-digit code, which participants generated at T1 and T2.

At the beginning and at the end of the first part of the survey, we informed participants that the study consisted of two parts. After completing T1, participants indicated whether they agreed to also respond to the second questionnaire. Those who were inclined to do so were further requested to provide an email address to which the link to the second part was sent by the survey software. In order to ensure anonymity, the survey software had been programmed in a way so that it automatically sent without our assistance a prewritten invitation mail to the second part of the survey to the address participants stated at T1. In the instruction, this procedure was explained in detail. Before we matched the data across measurement occasions and started to analyze them, email addresses were removed from the data set.

Prior to collecting the data, we presented the study to our university’s ethics committee. As it did not deviate from legal regulations or the ethical guidelines of the German Association of Psychology, the ethics committee authorized the study in its final form. Due to the online assessment, we did not personally interact with participants and therefore did not obtain their signed declarations of consent. Yet, we informed them about the study’s content, duration, and aims, and we highlighted that, at any time, participants could abandon the online questionnaire by closing the browser or tab. Participants were assured that incomplete data sets would be deleted and would not be incorporated into our analyses. Moreover, quoting their individual ten-digit code they had developed during the survey, participants were granted the opportunity to still withdraw their data after completing the entire questionnaire.

Participants were recruited in (virtual) business networks and on social media platforms. In sum, 292 employees finished the first part of the questionnaire, but only 144 of them completed its second part. Given the high drop-out rate (50.68%), we compared the responses of those finishing the entire survey with those of participants who did not answer its second part. Analyses did not reveal any systematic drop-out (all p > 0.05). Due to missing data across both measurement occasions, we had to exclude 16 participants from the analyses, so that the final sample consisted of 128 followers. Among them, 60.90% were females. The average age was 36.17 years ( SD = 11.50 years). Participants were employed in a variety of industries (i.e., service companies, retail stores, public services, industrial companies) and had been working for their current organization an average of 8–9 years ( M = 8.57, SD = 8.99). At the time they completed the survey, followers had been collaborating with their current leader for about three and a half years ( M = 3.52, SD = 3.36).

Listing and Assessment of Organizational Goals

In accordance with prior research (e.g., Maier and Brunstein, 2001 ), we ideographically assessed organizational goals by asking participants to freely generate and notice up to three work-related goals. Goals were defined as objectives, projects, and plans related to one’s job that were set by or agreed upon with one’s leader. Given the future-orientation of the higher-order vision transformational leaders articulate ( Bass, 1985 ), participants were instructed to focus on those goals they were encouraged to pursue during the following 12 months. After listing these goals, participants indicated the extent to which they perceived each of them to be important and attainable on a five-point response scale ranging from 1 = not at all to 5 = very much . We computed an overall measure of goal importance and goal attainability by averaging responses across the three goals. A major precondition for aggregating within-person data to the between-person level is sufficient reliability of the aggregate. In order to determine the homogeneity [ICC(1)] and reliability [ICC(2)] of the goal ratings, we calculated intraclass correlation coefficients as suggested by Lüdtke and Trautwein (2007) . ICC(1) coefficients were 0.38 for importance and 0.37 for attainability. The corresponding ICC(2) coefficients were 0.65 and 0.64, respectively. ICC(2) is a function of ICC(1) and the number of goals assessed and reliability increases the more goals that are being evaluated. As in the present study only three goals were assessed, intraclass correlation coefficients are within an acceptable range ( Lüdtke and Trautwein, 2007 ).

Transformational Leadership

To determine followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ transformational leadership behavior, we used the Transformational Leadership Inventory by Podsakoff et al. (1990) ; German form: Heinitz and Rowold (2007) . With its 22 items, the scale covers the transformational leadership behaviors articulating a vision (“My supervisor paints an interesting picture of the future for our group”), providing an appropriate model (“My supervisor provides a good model for me to follow”), fostering the acceptance of group goals (“My supervisor gets the group to work together for the same goal”), articulating high performance expectations (“My supervisor shows us that he/she expects a lot from us”), providing individualized support (“My supervisor behaves in a manner thoughtful of my personal needs”), and offering intellectual stimulation (“My supervisor challenges me to think about old problems in new ways”). On a response scale ranging from 1 = never to 5 = almost always followers stated how often their leaders use the behaviors illustrated. The internal consistency of the measure was α = 0.93.

Job Satisfaction

Participants’ job satisfaction was measured using the short version of Neuberger and Allerbeck’s (1978) Job Description Form. The unidimensional scale covers one’s satisfaction with seven facets of work (working conditions, tasks, relationship with colleagues, relationship with the supervisor, promotion opportunities, organization and management, and salary). Items were rated on a seven-point Kunin-scale ranging from 1 = completely dissatisfied to 7 = completely satisfied . Reliability of the scale was 0.82.

Organizational Commitment

Organizational commitment was measured with the short version of the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire ( Mowday et al., 1979 ; German form: Maier and Woschée, 2002 ). Participants were asked to indicate their agreement (ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree ) to nine statements about their identification with and involvement in their organizations (“For me this is the best of all possible organizations for which to work”). Cronbach’s alpha of the scale was 0.91.

Proactive Behavior

To assess participants’ proactive behavior, we used the respective subscale of an organizational citizenship behavior questionnaire ( Staufenbiel and Hartz, 2000 ). The scale comprises five items (“I bring in innovative ideas to improve the quality of my department”) which assess an employee’s voluntary behaviors directed at keeping oneself informed about one’s organization, advancing its quality and performance, as well as improving one’s own qualifications. Items were to be answered on a scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree and showed an internal consistency of 0.82.

Table ​ Table1 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and correlations of the study variables. Hypotheses 1 and 2 assumed a positive association between transformational leadership and followers’ evaluation of the organizational goals that were set by or agreed upon with their leaders. As Table ​ Table1 1 shows, followers’ perception of their leaders’ transformational leadership behavior was indeed positively related to the importance they attach to these goals ( r = 0.30, p < 0.01) and to the attainability they ascribe to them ( r = 0.23, p < 0.01). Hypotheses 1 and 2 are thus supported.

Descriptive statistics and correlations of the study variables.

Hypothesis 3 supposed the goal attributes to jointly transmit the effect of transformational leadership on followers’ (a) job satisfaction, (b) organizational commitment, and (c) proactive behavior. To explore this assumption, we tested a multiple mediation model according to Preacher and Hayes (2008) using Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS macro for SPSS. Their approach allows the testing of multiple mediators and multiple outcomes also in smaller samples and accounts for the fact that the sampling distribution of total and indirect effects is commonly not normally distributed ( MacKinnon et al., 2004 ). In order to yield more precise estimates, total and specific indirect effects are bootstrapped and confidence limits for these effects are estimated. In our study, we drew on 95% bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals (BCa CI) based on 5,000 bootstrap samples. To test our hypothesis we modeled all variables (transformational leadership as predictor, goal importance and goal attainability as mediators operating in parallel, as well as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior as outcomes) within a single multiple mediation model. In line with previous meta-analyses ( Fuller et al., 1996 ; Lowe et al., 1996 ; Judge and Piccolo, 2004 ; Wang et al., 2011 ), we found significant total effects of follower-rated transformational leadership on their job satisfaction ( b = 1.065, BCa CI [0.855, 1.275]), organizational commitment ( b = 0.671, BCa CI [0.488, 0.853]), and proactive behavior ( b = 0.282, BCa CI [0.084, 0.480]). For each outcome this effect decreased in size when the goal attributes were considered simultaneously (see the values of the direct effects of transformational leadership on the outcome variables displayed in Figure ​ Figure1 1 ). Whereas the direct effect of transformational leadership on job satisfaction and organizational commitment remained significant when controlling for goal attributes suggesting partial mediation, the one on proactive behavior turned out to be only marginally significant under this condition ( Figure ​ Figure1 1 ). Estimates of the total indirect effect show that, together, both goal attributes mediate the effect of perceived transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction ( b = 0.111, BCa CI [0.028, 0.241]), organizational commitment ( b = 0.071, BCa CI [0.014, 0.169]), and proactive behavior ( b = 0.086, BCa CI [0.020, 0.188]). Hypothesis 3 is thus supported. Given that we considered multiple mediators, we could not draw on Preacher and Kelley’s (2011) κ 2 in determining the size of the indirect effect, but had to rely on the ratio of the indirect effect to the total effect ( MacKinnon et al., 1995 ). One of the disadvantages of this effect size measure is that it may exceed 1 if the indirect effect is bigger than the total effect and may exhibit values below 0 if one of these effects is negative ( Hayes, 2013 ). For job satisfaction, 10.4% of the total effect of transformational leadership was transmitted by the goal attributes, for organizational commitment 10.5% of the total effect resulted from mediation, and in proactive behavior this proportion amounted to 30.4%.

Direct effects of transformational leadership on goal attributes and outcomes as well as of goal attributes on outcomes within the multiple mediation model.

Besides the total indirect effect, PROCESS also estimates the extent to which each mediator transmits the effect of the predictor on the outcome conditional on the presence of the other intervening variables operating in parallel ( Preacher and Hayes, 2008 ). These specific indirect effects give evidence on the relative magnitude of each mediator included in the model. As indicated by the confidence intervals displayed in Table ​ Table2, 2 , the effect of perceived transformational leadership on job satisfaction and proactive behavior was solely transmitted by followers’ evaluation of the goals’ attainability. With regard to their organizational commitment, we found the effect to be solely mediated by followers’ ratings of the goals’ importance. For this indirect effect, the confidence interval did not include zero. Goal attributes thus seem to be differentially important for the different outcomes.

Specific indirect effects of transformational leadership on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior transmitted through the goal attributes goal importance and goal attainability.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the linkage between transformational leadership and followers’ job attitudes as well as their proactive behavior focusing on the goal setting process. We aimed at illustrating that TLs enable followers to autonomously organize their goal pursuit, which we assumed to find expression in higher follower perceptions of the importance and attainability of the goals these leaders set. In line with our assumptions, we indeed found positive relations between follower-rated transformational leadership and their assessment of both goal attributes. TLs articulate an ideological vision and lay emphasis on the meaning of tasks, but also grant followers responsibility and support. Together, these behaviors result in higher levels of identification with and commitment to the organizational goals these leaders set. By demonstrating confidence in their followers’ capability, increasing opportunities for them to significantly affect their work, and providing instrumental and emotional support, TLs lead employees to further perceive these goals to be attainable. Enhancing the importance and attainability of the goals they disseminate, TLs are thus able to facilitate their followers’ organizational goal striving.

In support of our third hypothesis, ratings of the goal attributes mediated the relation between followers’ perceptions of transformational leadership and their job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior. This result supplements earlier findings by Maier and Brunstein (2001) in the domain of personal goals based on which the authors concluded that a sense of commitment to valued goals and the perception of favorable conditions for goal attainment are important requirements for one’s well-being. Our findings suggest that this conclusion also holds when goals are set by a leader instead of followers themselves. Also during the pursuit of assigned goals at work, a goal’s importance and attainability are crucial for success and ultimately for one’s job-related well-being and performance.

Analyses of the specific indirect effects corroborate that goal importance and goal attainability differentially mediated the effect of transformational leadership on the outcomes considered. Whereas transformational leadership and job satisfaction as well as proactive behavior were solely associated via the perception of a goal’s attainability, these leadership behaviors unfolded their impact on followers’ organizational commitment via followers’ perceptions of the goal’s importance only. Concerning followers’ organizational commitment, we think that this mediation can be explained by a spread-out effect in which the appreciation of and identification with a certain vision or goal serves as a proxy for the whole organization. As Mowday et al. (1982) stated, organizational commitment is characterized by “a strong belief in and acceptance of the organization’s goals and values” (p. 27). Therefore, perceiving organizational goals as important is a relevant mechanism in transmitting the effect of transformational leadership on followers’ organizational commitment. Our finding that goal attainability does not significantly mediate this relation might be explained by the fact that employees expect their leaders to facilitate their work in any case ( Ng and Sorensen, 2008 ). Meta-analytic evidence, though, shows followers’ affective commitment to be most affected by perceptions of organizational support ( Meyer et al., 2002 ). As favorable conditions for goal attainment seem to be taken for granted ( Ng and Sorensen, 2008 ) and are thus not perceived as particular support, they probably do not specifically increase followers’ attachment to the organization. With regard to followers’ job satisfaction and proactive behavior, by contrast, goal attainability appeared to be a significant mediator conditional on the presence of goal importance as a second mediator. With regard to one’s satisfaction, this finding is in line with research on personal goals: In this domain, goal attainability has been meta-analytically shown to be associated with an individual’s subjective well-being (e.g., life satisfaction or positive affect); and personal work-related goals were found to more specifically relate to one’s job satisfaction ( Klug and Maier, 2015 ). Unfortunately, the association with a goal’s importance has not been considered within this integrative work. Our findings suggest that in order to be satisfied with one’s job, followers have to be convinced to be able to attain the organizational goals they have been assigned rather than considering these goals to be important. This finding deviates from evidence on the significance of one’s goal commitment within the goal setting theory (for an overview: Locke and Latham, 2002 ), as well as from evidence on the personal goal model of well-being corroborating that goals need to be both important and attainable in order to increase employees’ job satisfaction ( Maier and Brunstein, 2001 ). In addition, meta-analytic evidence in the field of work design highlights a task’s significance, which is closely associated with an organizational goal’s importance, to be a major correlate of one’s satisfaction with work ( Humphrey et al., 2007 ). As, based on this former research, we would have expected goal importance perceptions to equally mediate the effect of transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction, we recommend to reinvestigate the value of followers’ goal importance evaluations in relation to transformational leadership and subordinates satisfaction with work. Also with regard to followers’ proactive behavior, only attainability perceptions mediated the effect of transformational leadership. If employees believe they may affect work outcomes, their willingness to take responsibilities and action is stimulated ( Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998 ). Accordingly, followers who perceive favorable conditions for goal realization are likely to proactively develop these goals and ways to achieve the vision TLs articulate. In previous research, feelings of being able to successfully perform a task have rather been found to moderate the relation between transformational leadership and proactive behavior instead of mediating it ( Den Hartog and Belschak, 2012 ). This earlier work, though, assessed followers’ self-efficacy beliefs, whereas our study focused on the attributes of the goal. Whether TLs exert an identifiable independent influence on both followers’ self-evaluation of their abilities as well as on their perception of the goals’ attributes and – if so – whether these influences operate differently is an important question to answer in future research. Contradicting our assumption, goal importance did not mediate the impact of TLs on followers’ proactive behavior. Maybe, a strong sense of goal importance or commitment may thwart followers’ proactive behavior such that they solely focus on the goal on duty and behaviors directed at attaining this specific goal. In this case, positive effects on followers’ in-role performance are more likely to evolve than effects on their proactive behavior.

Theoretical Implications and Future Research

Integrating theorizing and research on self-regulated goal pursuit and personal goals with the goal setting of TLs, the present study broadens previous findings on the mechanisms of transformational leadership. Theoretically, it has widely been reasoned that TLs exert their influence on followers’ performance by increasing the importance of organizational goals and boosting followers’ feelings of being able to attain these goals, that way supporting followers’ goal pursuit. Empirical evidence on these deliberations, though, is still scarce. Our results show that TLs facilitate their followers’ goal striving by enhancing their perceptions of the importance and attainability of organizational goals.

The role of TLs within the goal setting process has first been analyzed by Kirkpatrick and Locke (1996) . In a laboratory simulation, they found that leaders’ visions affect followers’ performance to the extent that they inspire the setting of specific goals. These researchers, however, investigated quality goals only and the way they assessed goals induced specific (number of errors) rather than vague as well as self-set instead of assigned goals. In the following, Bono and Judge (2003) studied the influence of transformational leadership on followers’ goals among dyads of leaders and followers. They demonstrated that the more transformational supervisors lead, the more self-concordant (i.e., representative for personally held values) are the work goals followers set themselves. Like Kirkpatrick and Locke (1996) , also Bono and Judge (2003) focused on followers’ self-generated goals rather than examining the impact of TLs on the organizational goals they set. Other work considered strategic goals disseminated by top management which were assessed and evaluated in qualitative research ( Berson and Avolio, 2004 ), related to an organization’s overall goal ( Wright et al., 2012 ), or did not specifically focus on goals but rather on the way a job is to be done in general ( Bronkhorst et al., 2015 ). The study by Colbert et al. (2008) , which also examined a goal’s importance, did not neither refer to goals, which decidedly have been assigned by leaders. They analyzed broader goals, which in a pre-survey have been identified by CEOs to be relevant to the specific industry the research was conducted in (e.g., “Improving customer service” or “Improving the efficiency of internal operations”). Those studies, which indeed investigated organizational goals set by a leader, either viewed goal attributes to moderate the relation between transformational leadership and outcomes ( Whittington et al., 2004 ) or concentrated on the team level evaluation of these attributes ( Chi et al., 2011 ). In our research, we overcome some of these shortcomings: (1) We focused on two decisive goal attributes which have widely been neglected in the study of transformational leadership so far; (2) we concentrated on goals that have been set by leaders – the traditional basis of goal setting theory and one of the main tasks leaders have to complete; and (3) we ideographically assessed organizational goals and followers’ individual evaluations of these goals. Implementing these characteristics, we empirically emphasized goal attributes to be an important mechanism of transformational leadership.

Nevertheless, our findings are just the beginning of systematically bringing together evidence and theorizing on transformational leadership and goals. Future study efforts need to continue this integration. A first step to further intertwine these streams of research is to consider other goal attributes, which have been highlighted to affect the setting of goals (e.g., goal distance, goal orientation, feedback; Locke and Latham, 2002 ). With regard to followers’ self-efficacy, an important moderator within the goal setting theory, an extensive body of evidence has already been accumulated showing TLs to boost followers’ beliefs in their own (work-related) capabilities (e.g., Pillai and Williams, 2004 ; Liu et al., 2010 ; Den Hartog and Belschak, 2012 ). In addition to considering further mediators and moderators of goal setting, the goal attributes importance and attainability need to be assessed in more detail (e.g., Brunstein, 1993 ) than we did here.

Moreover, considering the statement by Howell and Shamir (2005) that “leaders and followers both play an active role in shaping their mutual relationships, and therefore shaping organizational outcomes” (p. 108) we argue for a leader-follower-fit perspective in future research. The underlying notion of such a perspective is that leaders should tailor their behavior to suit their followers’ needs. Regarding the regulation of one’s goal striving, individuals have certain preferences how to pursue goals (assessment or locomotion regulatory mode) as well as preferences for a desired or undesired end state (promotion or prevention regulatory focus; Higgins, 2000 , 2002 ). The link between transformational leadership and employees’ regulatory mode has already been examined empirically ( Benjamin and Flynn, 2006 ). Results demonstrate that followers with more of a locomotion regulatory mode (i.e., desire to move from one state to another) were more affected by TLs than followers with more of an assessment mode (i.e., desire to make comparisons and judgments before acting and appraising performance against standards). This seems to be the case as TLs tend to emphasize movement from state to state. Furthermore, there is evidence that the positive effects of articulating a vision are contingent on follower regulatory focus . In two experiments Stam et al. (2010) showed that visions focusing on preventing an undesirable situation lead to better performance than visions focusing on promoting a desirable situation for more prevention-focused followers (who want to avoid failures and fears), while the reverse was true for more promotion-focused followers (who want to reach success and ideals). The fit between followers’ regulatory mode and focus should therefore be further investigated as possible moderator in the interplay of transformational leadership behaviors and followers’ goal striving.

The congruence of leaders’ and followers’ goal appraisals should also be examined. If leaders set their followers goals, an individual redefinition process starts by which followers convert external tasks into internal ones ( Hackman, 1970 ; Hacker, 1982 ). Employees might be successful in striving for reinterpreted goals, which, in turn, may foster proactive behavior. The question, however, arises whether followers work on the task intended by the leader or whether the redefinition process leads them to work toward goals their leaders never wanted them to pursue. Therefore, research to come should not only assess followers’ evaluation of the goals they have been assigned, but should also consider whether leaders and followers agree upon the content of the goals, which are to be attained.

Just like in everyday life (cf. Austin and Vancouver, 1996 ), also at work individuals have to simultaneously pursue multiple goals. While acting on the attainment of one goal, employees scan the environment for opportunities to act on the other goals. This may lead to deferrals and reprioritizations of goals of which leaders are unaware. In the field of close relationships, Brunstein et al. (1996) showed that being aware of one’s partners’ goals, significantly influences the association among goal-related support and judgments of marital satisfaction. Only if participants were aware of their partners’ goals, the provision of goal-related support was significantly associated with their partners’ satisfaction. Transferring these findings to the field of leader-follower-interactions, it seems fruitful to explore whether leaders have to know which particular goal their followers actually strive for and how they progress in order to provide the most effective support. As, however, followers and leaders commonly share a more task-oriented relationship than couples, followers might feel controlled instead of empowered under this condition.

Managerial Implications

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 one hand, 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 ).

Limitations

Despite these contributions, the present study has several limitations. First, our research was solely based on self-report data increasing the possibility of common method and social desirability bias ( Podsakoff and Organ, 1986 ). However, we consciously adopted this approach (see Conway and Lance, 2010 ) since all of our variables dealt with respondents’ personal cognition and affect. Obviously, respondents themselves are the most reliable and appropriate source of information in this particular case (cf. Chan, 2009 ). To avoid common method bias, leadership behaviors could have been analyzed as a self-report measure on the part of the leaders. In this study, though, we were interested in the perceptions of followers. Consistent with Walumbwa et al. (2007) we assert that leaders behave differently across situations and individuals or at least are perceived as behaving differently by those affected by these behaviors. Consequently, we actually examined whether differences in the perception of leadership account for variations in followers’ cognition and affect. Although it has been reasoned that the effects of common method variance are overstated ( Spector, 2006 ) and empirical evidence suggests they are leveled out by measurement errors ( Lance et al., 2010 ), we nevertheless collected data at two points in time and ensured participants’ anonymity to reduce possible response biases. Temporal separation of the assessment of predictors and outcomes is one of the procedural remedies suggested by Podsakoff et al. (2012) in order to control for common method biases. By introducing a time lag between these measurements, biases resulting from followers’ desire to appear consistent across responses as well as from demand characteristics related to the specific items may be attenuated ( Podsakoff et al., 2012 ).

The study design with its two temporally separated measurement occasions, however, is associated with a second limitation of the present work: the poor participation of respondents at the second time point and hence the high drop-out rate (cf. Podsakoff et al., 2012 ). High attrition rates and the associated risk of biased sample selection are particularly common when participants are recruited online and data is collected through the internet at more than one measurement occasion ( Kraut et al., 2004 ). The higher anonymity resulting from the web-based survey method might have caused a decrease in the response rate in our study. Participants did not feel as obliged to fill in the second part of the questionnaire, as they probably would have felt if the data had been collected in cooperation with a specific company. Moreover, we did not offer any kind of incentive, which might have increased the motivation to take part at T2. Nevertheless, we tested for systematic attrition and did not find any differences between respondents and non-respondents.

Although the two-wave study design helps in reducing potential biases resulting from common method variance, it is limited with regard to the examination of mediation effects ( Cohen et al., 2003 ): Based on such a design we may not readily draw rigorous causal inferences ( Cole and Maxwell, 2003 ). Even if we had adopted a sequential design and had added a third time point to measure transformational leadership, the goal attributes, and outcome variables at a distinct time point each, longitudinal mediation would not have been assessed more accurately ( Mitchell and Maxwell, 2013 ). Both designs fail to account for prior levels of the variables and thus for autoregressive effects, which indicate stable individual differences in a certain variable ( Preacher, 2015 ). In order to clarify the causal order of effects, longitudinal designs are needed which assess predictor, mediator, and outcome variables simultaneously at each of various measurement occasions ( Cole and Maxwell, 2003 ). Using such a design, we may rigorously examine the proposed mediating effects, contrast them with alternative causal models, and relate them to concurrent causal influences ( Cole and Maxwell, 2003 ). Given this deficiency in our study design, we have to be careful when interpreting our findings as evidence on the mediation model we assumed, because we may not rule out alternative causal effects. Experimental and training research, however, demonstrated an impact of transformational leadership on followers’ perception of related goal attributes (e.g., Bono and Judge, 2003 ) just as on the outcomes we considered (e.g., Barling et al., 1996 ). In the field of personal goals, Maier and Brunstein (2001) provided evidence based on longitudinal data that differences in the interplay between work-related goal commitment and goal attainability reliably predict changes in newcomers’ job satisfaction and job commitment during the first 8 months after organizational entry. In addition, goal effectiveness trainings designed to enhance students’ commitment to goals as well as their goal attainability perceptions improved the effectiveness of the students’ goal striving process and ultimately led to increases in their satisfaction with their studies ( Brunstein et al., 2008 ). Due to their respective designs, these studies allow for strong inferences on causality. The causal effects are in line with the mediation chain we proposed, and therefore reinforce our assumption that transformational leadership affects followers’ perceptions of goal attributes, which in turn exert an influence on their job-related attitudes and proactive behavior. Nonetheless, we recommend future research to further substantiate the impact of transformational leadership on followers’ job satisfaction, commitment, and proactive behavior via goal attributes longitudinally by drawing on cross-lagged panel or latent growth curve models or other currently emerging strategies to model longitudinal mediation (cf. Preacher, 2015 ).

An additional limitation of our study is that the data was collected in one specific (Western) culture. It is therefore uncertain whether our findings are generalizable across cultures. Given that a cultural influence may especially be assumed with regard to the visionary content transformational leaders convey ( House et al., 2004 ), particularly the impact of TLs on a goal’s importance may vary dependent on the vision theme that is being communicated within a certain culture. In order to yet strengthen the generalizability of our findings, we included a diverse sample representing a broad range of organizations and a variety of industries.

Finally, we cannot rule out that general perceptions of control or support at work might have influenced followers’ ratings of the goal attributes. Future research should consider constructs such as locus of control or decision latitude as well as a supportive organizational culture as influences on followers’ goal attribute perceptions.

Our study integrates research and theorizing on self-regulatory processes, goal setting, and personal goals in the context of transformational leadership. Although these constructs share certain overlap, they have traditionally been considered from different perspectives. The study empirically supports theoretical assumptions related to the effect of transformational leadership on followers’ goal pursuit showing that TLs influence the extent to which individuals perceive organizational goals as important and attainable. This is remarkable as leading through goals has originally been associated with a task-oriented leadership style according to which leaders set a specific goal, monitor its progress, and allocate rewards. We have learned that TLs exert their impact on followers’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and proactive behavior through the goal attributes importance and attainability. Findings suggest that these attributes are decisive in one’s goal striving no matter if a goal is self-set or assigned. However, both goal attributes differentially mediate the effect of transformational leadership. In sum, the present work thus contributes to the fields of leadership as well as goal research and their integration.

Author Contributions

BS and HK conceptualized the study with careful advice by GM. BS designed the study materials and collected the data. BS and HK processed the data. All authors were concerned with their analysis and interpretation. BS and HK drafted the earlier versions of the manuscript. GM thoroughly commented on these versions inducing further intellectual content. Before submitting the present work, BS substantially revised the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Melanie Hoff in collecting the data.

Funding. We acknowledge support for the Article Processing Charge by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Open Access Publication Fund of Bielefeld University.

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Leadership Models and Work Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of Consequences of Authentic and Transformational Leadership

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With increasing importance of organizational effectivity and efficiency measures like Balanced Scorecard and optimization of employee work behavior to achieve higher organizational efficiency, Human Resource activities concerning leadership development and academic leadership research are growing. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, a multitude of empirical studies show primarily positive relationships between different constructs of leadership models and desirable variables of organizational behavior. It becomes apparent, though, that in academic research the selection of analyzed leadership models and their consequences is very heterogeneous. This Master Thesis has the objective to contribute to Leadership Research by applying a comparative empirical study in the–until today–often neglected study population of in-house and sales personnel within the pharmaceutical industry. For this purpose, an online employee survey with N = 137 participants from a leading pharmaceutical company in Germany was conducted. Based on contemporary leadership theory, a range of Hypotheses regarding consequences of modern leadership models is empirically tested. The results of the study reconfirm Identification with Manager, Trust & Loyalty and Employee Satisfaction as consequences of Authentic as well as Transformational leadership. Work context as in-house vs. sales setting shows moderating effects on some of the leadership-consequences relationships. As the research involves multiple structurally different variables as well as constructs and compares feedback of different study populations, tangible management implications to boost desirable work attitudes and behaviors can be derived and appropriately adapted to match the respective work context. Ramifications for future scientific research are also presented.

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” (Comment by Ronald Reagan, former U.S. President)

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Introduction

Leadership and Employees’ Satisfaction in Contemporary Organizations

Leadership Styles, Related Outcomes and Practical Suggestions

1 the importance of leadership for corporate success.

Today’s organizational and business environments become heavily disrupted by challenges stemming from political, economic, social or technological currents and trends. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, faces strains like global, regional or local pressures on product pricing, new Market Access hurdles, compliance guidelines and regulations, competition from innovative, generic or biosimilar companies as well as the advent of digital business models that put corporations under pressure to be effective and efficient. Human Resource (HR) departments evaluate how to best deal with one of the companies’ most important resource: their employees. Therefore, leadership is key in organizations’ strive for long-term success and financial performance. In order to contribute to leadership research and its positive outcomes for organizations’ success, this work’s main objective is to provide an overview of relevant leadership theories, to summarize current scientific literature on consequences of leadership and to empirically test relationships between leadership and defined work attitudes and behaviors. A secondary objective is to close research gaps regarding leadership in different work contexts, esp. with regards to pharmaceutical sales and in-house personnel.

2 The Concept of Leadership

Burns ( 1978 ) stated that “Leadership is one of the most observed, yet least understood, phenomena on earth” (p. 3). This indicates that both the scientific and managerial community operates with various definitions of leadership. Vecchiotti’s ( 2018 ) chronological perspective of leadership definition development starts with a patriarchic view based on characteristics of men situated in positions of authority. Over time, the role of subordinates was recognized and leadership encourages implementers to contribute to achieve mutually agreed goals. A paradigm shift due to new aspects like collaboration, teamwork, work-life balance, continuous feedback and learning becomes apparent (Vecchiotti 2018 ). Consequently, the following definition best reflects the latest view: “Leadership is a long-term, value-based process that encourages leaders and implementers to initiate actions that contribute to achieving a common purpose, and to willingly make significant contributions in meeting mutually agreed to goals.” (Vecchiotti 2011 , p. 6). Leadership, by its processual character, is a construct that has to be considered ambiguous, polymorphic and multifaceted. Von Rostenstiel’s Leadership Model (Fig. 1 ) comprehensively describes the various components and entry points for leadership theory and research (von Rosenstiel 2001 ).

Von Rostenstiel’s Leadership Model. Source: von Rosenstiel ( 2001 )

Von Rosenstiel’s Model is an excellent stimulus to look into four different approaches widely discussed: trait approach, behavioral approach, contingency approach, as well as two contemporary approaches of positive leadership.

Historically, leaders were described by traits (Galton and Eysenck 1869 ). In the 1930s and 1940s, leadership research focused on personal characteristics of an individual and sought to identify personality, social, physical, or intellectual attributes that differentiate leaders from non-leaders. Trait theory was aiming at discovering a built-in set of traits that leaders possess, e.g. “aggressiveness”, “self-control”, “independence”, friendliness”, or “optimism” (Owens 1973 ). A famous example is the “Big 5” Personality Model with the five fundamental dimensions “extraversion”, “agreeableness”, “conscientiousness”, “emotional stability” and “openness to experience” (Costa and McCrae 1992 ; Norman 1963 ; Tupes and Christal 1961 ). Academic research describes “Extraversion” as the most predictive trait of leadership (Bass and Bass 2008 ).

Behavioral theory tries to identify the right things effective leaders do, e.g. how they communicate, motivate, delegate, plan, or handle meetings (Owens 1973 ). The most comprehensive example is the Ohio State Studies with the objective to identify independent dimensions of leadership behavior (Schriesheim and Bird 1979 ). Two key dimensions are “Initiating Structure” and “Consideration”. The former describes task-oriented behavior, e.g. putting high emphasis on work organization, work relationships, deadlines and goal attainment. The latter refers to people-oriented behavior with a focus on mutual trust, respect for subordinates’ ideas, and regard for their feelings (Fleishman and Peters 1962 ). One of the biggest contribution of behavioral theory is the introduction of five leadership styles: (1) the autocratic leader (who permits little or no freedom, relying on his or her position, knowledge or power to reward and punish), (2) the bureaucratic leader (who gives clear orders, relying on the organization’s policies, procedures and rules), (3) the diplomatic leader (who provides limited freedom, relying on personal persuasion), (4) the participative leader (who gives a high degree of freedom and accepts group decisions and majority votes) and (5) the free-reign leader (who lets subordinates operate freely unless asked for invention) (Owens 1973 ).

Contingency approaches of leadership comprise three elements: (1) a dimension of leader behavior (“x”), (2) a criterion by which the effectiveness of the leader may be determined (“y”), (3) an environmental or situational variable (“z”) (Korman 1972 ). The focus is on the environmental or situational impact “z”, which influences the correlation between “x” and “y”. In the 1960s, Fiedler’s Contingency Model is looking for the proper match between a leader’s style (i.e. task- vs. relationship-oriented) and the degree to which the situation gives the leader control. If the right match is achieved, effective group performance follows (Fiedler 1977 ). According to Fiedler’s Model, a situation is assessed in terms of three situational dimensions: (1) leader-member relations, (2) task structure, (3) power situation. The combination of these dimensions leads to eight possible categories of leadership situations (Fiedler 1972 ). Fiedler’s fundamental conclusion is to define two ways to improve leader effectiveness: (1) Change of the leader in order to fit the situation, or (2) Change the situation to fit the leader.

Today, two so-called “positive leadership styles” attract high scholarly and managerial attention: Transformational Leadership (TL) and Authentic Leadership (AL). Transformational leaders motivate and encourage others to outperform expectations (Podsakoff et al. 1990 ). The four components of TL are referred to as the “4 I’s”: Idealized influence/charismatic leadership, Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation, and Individualized consideration. As TL is associated with performance beyond expectations, this model remains at the forefront of scholarly attention (Bass and Reggio 2006 ; Gardner et al. 2010 ; Yaslioglu and Erden 2018 ). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, authentic leadership gained high scholarly attention and is now among the most prominent leadership styles studied (Banks et al. 2016 ; Berkovich 2014 ; Celik et al. 2016 ; Walumbwa et al. 2008 ). Walumbwa et al. ( 2008 ) define AL as a composite of four dimensions: (1) self-awareness (including an understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses and being cognizant of one’s impact on other people), (2) relational transparency (which means presenting one’s authentic self to others, sharing information and expressing one’s true thoughts and feelings), (3) balanced processing (which means to objectively analyze all relevant data before decision making including challenge deeply held positions), (4) internalized moral perspective (which refers to an integrated form of self-regulation guided by internal moral standards and values versus outside pressures) (Walumbwa et al. 2008 ). In sum, AL is a construct that incorporates traits, behaviors, styles and skills to promote ethical and honest behavior (Covelli and Mason 2017 ).

3 Constructs and Generation of Hypotheses

A recent meta-analytic review by Banks et al. ( 2016 ) indicates construct redundancy of TL and AL, claiming that none of the constructs adds palpable incremental validity beyond the other. Joo and Nimon ( 2014 ) though concluded that both leadership models are complementary, not substitutable (Joo and Nimon 2014 ). Consequently, it is hypothesized that TL and AL both contribute to the relationship of leadership with various dependent variables by explaining incremental variance.

In line with Zaccaro and Klimoski’s ( 2002 ) view that different dimensions of organizations can moderate the nature of organizational leadership and its antecedents and consequences (Zaccaro and Klimoski 2002 ), scientific leadership research has been covering many of these aspects (Golden and Shriner 2017 ; Charbonnier-Voirin et al. 2010 ; Jensen 2013 ; Kulophas et al. 2015 ; Zubair and Kamal 2016 ). According to Antonakis and Atwater ( 2002 ), structural distance can be defined as physical structure (i.e., physical distance between leader and subordinate), organizational structure (e.g., hierarchical level, span of control), and supervision structure (i.e., frequency of leader-subordinate interaction). In this work, research participants’ affiliation to a specific organizational setup (in-house vs. sales staff) of the collaborating pharmaceutical company is treated as context variable. Its moderating effect on various leadership-consequences relationships is analyzed. Especially the physical distance between leader and subordinate is structurally different in both work settings. When coming to TL’s and AL’s relationship with employee attitudinal and behavioral constructs, moderation analysis will be carried out on the basis of participants’ affiliation with one of the two work contexts. Moderation hypotheses in this work have the structure presented in Fig. 2 below.

Structure of hypothesized moderator effects. Source: Own representation

Social Identity Theory (SIT) postulates that individuals identify with social entities, e.g. individuals or organizations, to foster and maintain a positive self-concept (Tajfel and Turner 1986 ). Organizations offer employees a multitude of identification targets, so-called foci. These foci can be an organization as a whole, a team, or a manager (van Dick 2001 ). Positive leadership theories should be able to enhance subordinates’ identification with manager (IM). With respect to the IM construct, it is expected that both leadership models will contribute to employees’ Identification with Manager:

Authentic Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Identification with Manager

Transformational Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Identification with Manager

Moreover, it is hypothesized that the employees’ work context (i.e. organizational unit: in-house staff vs. sales) will have a moderating effect on the AL/TL-IM relationship:

The relationship between AL and IM will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

The relationship between TL and IM will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

According to West and Farr, Innovative Work Behavior (IWB) describes the intentional creation, introduction and application of new ideas within a work role, group or organization in order to benefit role performance, the group or the organization (West and Farr 1989 ). In line with previous research, it is expected that both leadership models contribute positively to employees’ IWB:

Authentic Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Innovative Work Behavior

Transformational Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Innovative Work Behavior

Moreover, it is postulated that employees’ work context, i.e. their affiliation to in-house vs. sales teams, will moderate the AL/TL-IWB relationship:

The relationship between AL and IWB will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

The relationship between TL and IWB will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

Rousseau et al. ( 1998 ) comprehensively describe the nature of the trust construct: “Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another” (p. 394f). It comprises both exchange processes and an understanding of trust subjects and objects not limited to an individual. For the purpose of this research, focus is on the interpersonal aspect of trust between manager (trust subject) and subordinate (trust object). According to Bass’ expansion of Burns’ TL theory, loyalty is an outcome of TL, mediated by trust, honesty and further qualities of the leader. This connection is substantiated in recent studies (e.g. Monzani et al. 2016 ). Overall, both leadership models are hypothesized to positively contribute to employees’ Trust and Loyalty (T&L):

Authentic Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Trust and Loyalty

Transformational Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Trust and Loyalty

Again, employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales team) is expected to moderate the AL/TL-T&L relationship:

The relationship between AL and T&L will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

The relationship between TL and T&L will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

Employee satisfaction (ES) is a construct frequently correlated with leadership in empirical research. Wong and Laschinger ( 2013 ), for example, established a direct positive relationship between AL and ES. Yang et al. ( 2011 ) confirmed a positive relationship for TL and ES. In this work, a positive relationship between both leadership models and subordinates’ ES is postulated:

Authentic Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Employee Satisfaction

Transformational Leadership will be a positive predictor of subordinates’ Employee Satisfaction

Employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales team) will have a moderating effect on the AL/TL-ES relationship:

The relationship between AL and ES will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

The relationship between TL and ES will be moderated by employees’ work context (in-house staff vs. sales)

4 Empirical Assessment of the Models

The statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics 21 including the macro PROCESS (Version 3.1) was used to test the hypotheses (Hayes 2013 ). In total, 5 hierarchical regression analyses were conducted, consisting out of subsequent, identical steps for each of the five dependent variables. PROCESS Matrix procedure was also chosen to define and analyze the models evaluating moderating effects. Tests of unconditional interactions between independent variables and conditional effects of focal predictors in accordance to values of the moderators are possible.

Data collection for this research project occurred through an online questionnaire activated from June 17th until/including July 15, 2018. Participating functions were employees and their first line managers from selected sales, marketing, market research, market access, medical management, patient care, human resources, communication and further business support teams. N = 247 employees, thereof N = 34 first line managers, were invited. To avoid respondents’ overload, a maximum duration of 15 min per survey is recommended (Batinic and Bosnjak 2000 ). With an average residence time of a bit longer than 11 min this threshold level was met. N = 143 employees clicked through the entire questionnaire. After initial exploratory descriptive data analysis using SPSS, N = 6 respondents were excluded due to missing data for four or more constructs. All final data analysis is therefore based on N = 137 respondents. Consequently, the ratio of evaluable cases vs. invited employees (N = 247) is 55%. Of N = 137 participants, 79 (58%) are female, 58 (42%) are male. The online cohort should quite closely reflect the workforce structure of companies of the healthcare sector. Regarding age distribution, the online cohort matches the national distribution of the German working population very well. An important variable is the affiliation of employees to in-house vs. sales personnel. In our sample, respondents are almost equally split between in-house based (N = 76; 55%) and sales employees (N = 61; 45%).

For the operationalization of AL, the ALQ (Authentic Leadership Questionnaire) as a well-established, theory-driven and validated measurement scale was chosen (Walumbwa et al. 2008 ). For the purpose of this research, a German translation of the ALQ, validated by Peus et al. ( 2012 ), was used. The version for external assessment from employees’ perspective was applied. Internal consistency alphas (Cronbach’s α) for each of the four subscales and the overall scale were originally reported to be higher than 0.7 in a cross-cultural validation study (Walumbwa et al. 2008 ). In the present project, SPSS data analysis shows a high Cronbach’s α of 0.94 for the overall ALQ construct. Responses were collected on a 5-point Likert scale with pre-determined answer options ranging from (1) “Does not apply at all” to (5) “Fully applies”; German translations were used, respectively.

TL is operationalized by the GTL (Global Transformational Leadership scale). This short measure was tested, validated and confirmed by many studies in various geographical and business contexts (Carless et al. 2000 ; van Beveren et al. 2017 ). In the present analysis, Cronbach’s α of 0.90 confirms its internal consistency. As in the original study, the response format was a 5-point Likert scale ranging from (1) “Does not apply at all” to (5) “Fully applies”.

Based on an instrument for Organizational Identification (OI) from Mael and Ashforth ( 1992 ), Ullrich et al. ( 2009 ) developed a short measure for IM consisting of three items. The original Cronbach’s α was .69 (Ullrich et al. 2009 ). Similar to organizations, teams or workgroups, managers can represent a social category with which employees identify themselves (Gautam et al. 2004 ). Therefore, the original OI instrument was amended to an IM scale. In the present research, a Cronbach’s α of 0.84 was reached. Consistent with the previous measurement constructs, a 5-point Likert scale with identical response options was used.

IWB is assessed by nine items derived from Scott and Bruce’s ( 1994 ) scale. It has also proven validity and reliability in the work of Janssen ( 2000 ). In accordance to the theoretical concept described earlier, three items each refer to the aspects of idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization. Again, a 5-point Likert scale was applied. Response options now ranged from (1) “Never” to (5) “Always”. Janssen ( 2000 ) reported a Cronbach’s α of 0.95 for this instrument. The present data set delivers a very acceptable Cronbach’s α of 0.90.

Trust in and loyalty to the leader is operationalized by use of a six item scale of Podsakoff et al. ( 1990 ). The first three items represent the trust component of the instrument. In turn, the remaining three items stand for employees’ sense of loyalty to their managers. Again, responses were collected on a 5-point Likert scale with answer options of (1) “Does not apply at all” to (5) “Fully applies”. In our data set a Cronbach’s α of 0.93 was reached, pointing to a very good internal consistency.

Additional constructs like Organizational Identification (OI) and Employee Satisfaction (ES) considered in the comprehensive work were operationalized by a validated 3-item scale from Mael and Ashforth ( 1992 ) and a five-item short instrument based on an original scale developed by Brayfield and Rothe ( 1951 ).

Hypotheses H 1a to H 8a are tested by application of regression analysis. Hierarchical Regression analysis is applied to evaluate the differential explanatory effect of both Leadership Models, AL vs. TL. Four three-step hierarchical regression analyses were run with the following dependent variables: IM, IWB, T&L and ES. At step one of each of the separate calculations, the demographic variables age and sex were entered to control for covariates. AL was entered at step two as first predictor of conceptual interest. The second predictor TL was entered at step three. The variables were introduced stepwise to see if they have an effect over and above covariates.

Table 1 shows the Means, Standard Deviations, Cronbach’s α for all constructs covered, as well as Intercorrelations.

Due to limited space, not all statistical analyses are presented in detail. Of course, all analyses and their results are available when contacting the authors. As age and gender might have effects on the dependent variables of interest, they were entered in the analyses as control variables.

TL explained additional variance above and beyond AL in Identification with the Manager, Trust and Loyalty in the leader, and Employee Satisfaction (confirmation of Hypotheses H 1a , H 2a , H 5a , H 6a, H 7a , H 8a ). However, neither AL nor TL explained significant variance in Innovative Work Behavior (rejection of Hypotheses H 3a , H 4a ,).

Nevertheless, when context was included inside the model (moderator: in-house vs. sales), there was a positive relation between AL and innovative work behavior for sales, but not for in-house staff (see Fig. 3 ). Additionally, the moderator analyses revealed that the relation for both AL and TL and trust and loyalty towards the leader was stronger in sales than in in-house staff (see Figs. 4 and 5 ). Consequently, hypotheses H 3b , H 5b , H 6b are confirmed. Hypotheses H 4b , as well as H 7b and H 8b on moderating influences of context on the relationship between AL/TL and ES are rejected, though.

The moderating influence of work context on the AL-IWB relationship. Source: Own representation based on SPSS analysis

The moderating influence of work context on the AL-T&L relationship. Source: Own representation based on SPSS analysis

The moderating influence of work context on the TL-T&L relationship. Source: Own representation based on SPSS analysis

5 Summary, Implications and Outlook

Key objective of this work was to empirically test the relationship between leadership and its key consequences. By means of an online survey with 137 employees of a pharmaceutical company in Germany, the importance of positive leadership models–Authentic and Transformational leadership–for the occurrence of desirable work attitudes and behaviors like Identification with Manager, Trust and Loyalty, and Employee Satisfaction, was documented. This implies that in corporate practice a positive leadership culture is suitable to stimulate relevant employee actions that contribute significantly to corporate success.

Based on a comprehensive literature review, AL and TL were identified as the main contemporary leadership models of interest. Consequently, these approaches constituted the key independent variables entered both into multiple hierarchical regression as well as moderation analysis models. As a secondary objective, the empirical analysis shed light on the pharmaceutical industry sector and expanded scientific knowledge regarding consequences and potential moderating effects of work contexts.

Essences of the present empirical research are:

Positive Leadership Behaviors (AL and TL) are positive predictors of critical employee attitudes and business targets like Identification with Manager, subordinates’ Trust and Loyalty, and Employee Satisfaction.

The empirical research results confirm construct validity and conceptual independence of both positive leadership theories, AL and TL.

Work context, operationalized as in-house vs. sales personnel, significantly impact some leadership-consequences relationships, i.e. leadership’s relationship with Trust and Loyalty is significantly moderated by work context (with a stronger effect in the study population of sales force); for the AL-IWB relationship, a significant moderating effect for sales personnel was also confirmed.

Although an often stated need for quantification of positive leadership behavior in corporate financial success and target figures was not subject of this investigation, the confirmed relationships between positive leadership and most of the desirable work attitudes and behaviors indicate that AL and TL contribute positively to operating profit.

In addition to the above mentioned financial aspects, hints on positive aspects of employee behavior, namely Innovative Work Behavior, could be derived. As this was especially accentuated in the context of customer facing sales personnel, one could infer that high AL in sales contexts can have a halo effect on sales reps customer interactions.

In order to achieve corporate goals, a recommendation to pharmaceutical companies is to establish a corporate culture that fosters positive leadership behavior. Leader recruitment, leadership training and development should take the “4 I’s” of TL and the four aspects of AL as a reference. Specific examples for HR departments can be to provide platforms and trainings for people managers to develop capabilities as mentors, coaches and active listeners. In order to be able to act as a positive role model for employees, leaders should be clear about ethical and moral standards, also with regards to the specifics of the pharmaceutical industry. Moreover, tools to foster leaders’ and employees’ self-awareness, a culture that supports transparency and one of error tolerance would be very beneficial to establish the desirable leadership styles, hence positive employee attitudes and behaviors.

Although this research shows promising results, a few limitations need to be mentioned. First, this study has a cross-sectional design. Therefore, longitudinal investigations could be of interest in order to evaluate intrapersonal developments over time and if and how they impact job attitudes and behavior. Second, due to requirements of the collaborating company’s works council in order to ensure anonymity and maximum data protection, a dyadic approach to collect and analyze data based on team structures was not allowed. It would be advisable for future research to collect and use this information in order to enhance data quality and model reliability by reducing a potentially high amount of additional variance. Similarly, the actual duration of individual leader-subordinate relationships could actively be controlled for, as interpersonal relationships including the development of trust tend to evolve over time. Third, all outcome variables are solely based on employee self-assessment. This potential for common source bias could be reduced in future studies if additional sources of feedback and information can be taken into account, e.g. supervisors’ evaluations of employees’ behavior or secondary data from more objective performance evaluations. Fourth, the present moderation analysis is purely based on self-reported organizational allocation to in-house vs. sales departments. This was used as a surrogate for work context, primarily reflecting physical distance to the supervisor, which in turn was supposed to impact frequency and quality of communication. However, quality of leader-subordinate interaction might be perceived quite differently on a personal level. In future studies, analysis could therefore be controlled for effective communication frequency and/or perceived quality of communication channel and content of leader-subordinate exchange.

Despite these limitations and implications for future research, the study provided various important insights. It seems to be first research project to systematically analyze the two contemporary positive leadership models Authentic Leadership and Transformational Leadership in a comparative context of in-house staff and sales representatives of a single pharmaceutical company in Germany.

In order to build on the current outcomes, the following direction for future research can be proposed. First, a longitudinal study design could be chosen to be able to track the development of interpersonal leader-subordinate relationships over time. Second, recourse to potentially more objective multi-source data to substantiate the expressed employee attitudes and behaviors might be beneficial. Third, the study could be run in or across different companies and industries to detect significant differences or communalities. Similarly, the study could be replicated by inclusion of different hierarchy levels within companies to assess if team size or span of control impacts the relationship of leadership and its consequences. Fourth, the evaluation of antecedents of AL and TL could be added to the research design to potentially derive implications for people management and personnel development.

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Lange, M.A., Hernandez-Bark, A. (2020). Leadership Models and Work Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of Consequences of Authentic and Transformational Leadership. In: Schweizer, L., Dingermann, T., Russe, O., Jansen, C. (eds) Advances in Pharma Business Management and Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35918-8_6

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Connecting Exponential Potential With Collective Progress

For many, the word “leadership” conjures an image of a single person at the helm, steering the ship. But it’s a misleading image. At CCL, we look at leadership as a social process, one that helps each person to discover the potential within themselves and — in turn — everyone around them.

To jumpstart that potential, your organization needs to be intentional by ensuring that clear Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (or DAC) are present from the start, as these are really the keys to how leadership works.

This introduction to our leadership philosophy dives into the DAC framework, outlining how its key components can transform the way you approach leadership:

• Direction — Learn how setting a clear objective makes it easier to avoid the detours and distractions that pull us away from reaching our goals.
• Alignment — See how embracing cross-department networking and creating space for open and inclusive conversations can minimize confusion and maximize output.
• Commitment — Discover how making the success of the collective a personal priority can inspire team members to shift from compliance to motivated commitment.

How can you boost DAC within your organization? We cover that too, with tips for engaging with your teams to identify areas of opportunity with the most potential for impact.

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With over 30 years of experience at CCL, Cindy has contributed to many aspects of CCL’s work: research, publication, product development, program evaluation, coaching, and management. She designs and manages R&D projects, coaches action learning teams, writes for multiple audiences, and is a frequent speaker at professional conferences.

Lynn leads teams across the Americas, Europe, and Africa that design and deliver leadership solutions for social sector organizations focused on K–12 and Higher Education, Nonprofits, and Population Health; social sector research and evaluation; fundraising; and program operations. She’s also Executive Sponsor of our Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Practice .

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Leadership requires building direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC). Train your team on our DAC framework for more effective leadership.

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