Transformational leadership’s effectiveness in organizational change

Abstract

Due to organizations’ necessity to continuously change and adapt to the fast changingconomic environment, successful implementation and management of organizational change has already been in the spotlight of scholars’ and practitioners’ interest for decades. From a microeconomic view, organizations’ employees’ attitudes and reactions towards change have been identified as the most important predictor of successful organizational change. Beyond the constructs describing positive reactions towards change, employees’ affective commitment to organizational change was shown as a strong predictor of employees’ change supportive behaviors. Moreover, derived from the change management and change leadership literature, leaders’ behavior has long been recommended as tipping the scale of successful change. As today’s change is complex and continuous in nature, continuous leadership behavior such as transformational leadership has lately been identified as being successful during change. Interestingly, it is only recently that transformational leadership has been linked to employees’ commitment to change directly. Thus, even though there is initial evidence that continuous transformational leadership positively influences employees’ affective commitment to a specific change, there is still a massive gap in literature to be filled with additional knowledge about this relationship. Consequently, the aim of this dissertation is to contribute to existing literature by deepening information about mediating and moderating effects relevant for the relationship between transformational leadership and commitment to change (affective as well as normative and continuance commitment to change), and to shed light on the possibility to increase change success by the development of transformational leadership. This goal is pursued by conducting three distinct empirical studies. In Study I: The Impact of Transformational Leadership on Followers’ Commitment to Change – Mediating and Moderating Effects, hypotheses are investigated using a crosssectional design with data of a heterogeneous sample of German employees with a total N = 160. Results show a significantly positive relation between transformational leadership and affective commitment to change, which is fully mediated by trustworthiness of top management. Also, job insecurity is found to fully mediate the negative impact of transformational leadership on continuance commitment to change. Moreover, results indicate that job insecurity moderates the relations between transformational leadership and affective and normative commitment to change. In Study II The Influence of Leaders’ Commitment to Change on the Effectiveness of Transformational Leadership in Change Situations - A Multilevel Investigation, hypotheses are tested with a cross-sectional multilevel design using data from 38 teams from different German organizations with a total of 177 participating team members. It is showed that beyond the transformational behaviors solely providing individual support has an impact on employees’ affective commitment to change. Moreover, providing an appropriate model is revealed as only positively contributing to followers’ affective commitment to change when leaders’ own affective commitment to change is high. In Study III - Training Transformational Leadership in Change: Improving Leaders’ Transformational Leadership Behavior, Employees’ Commitment to Change and Supervisors’ Ratings of Change Success, hypotheses are tested using a pretest-posttest control group design with 26 leaders in the experimental group and seven leaders in the control group. The training intervention results in a significant improvement of transformational leadership behavior and supervisors’ success appraisal of the change. With regard to employees’ commitment to change, a positive tendency of the training’s effectiveness is confirmed. The analyses further reveal that highly cooperative leaders improve stronger in transformational leadership behavior than low cooperative leaders. Moreover, employees of leaders high in cooperation report greater increase of commitment to change than employees of leaders low in cooperation. Results of the studies are discussed with regard to strength as well as limitations. Moreover, implications for further research and practice are presented.