Summary
Report
See the full content of this document
Extract
Transformational leadership and work commitment: an empirical study of plastic and chemical exporting firms in Thailand.
1. INTRODUCTION
The pace of change organizations confronting today has resulted in more adaptive and flexible leadership. Adaptive leaders work more effectively in rapidly changing environments by helping to make sense of the challenges confronted by both leaders and followers and accordingly appropriately responding to those challenges. Adaptive leaders work with their followers to generate creative solutions to complex problems, while also developing them to handle a broader range of leadership responsibilities (Bennie, 2001). Bass, 1985 labeled the type of adaptive leadership described above transformational. Transformational leaders concentrate their efforts on longer term goals; value and emphasize developing a vision and inspiring followers to pursue the vision; change or align systems to accommodate their vision rather than work within existing systems; and coach followers to take on greater responsibility for both their own and others' development (Howell & avolio,1993). Transformational leadership is the process of influencing major changes in the attitudes and assumptions of organization members and building commitment for the organization's mission or objectives (Yukl, 1999). Effective leaders in this context have been found to create a climate for innovation and learning, often through transformational leadership. Specifically, they provide visions of successful innovation, intellectual stimulation to enhance creativity, feelings of involvement and a willingness to disagree, and resources that allow needed autonomy and freedom to innovate (Elkins & Keller, 2003). Based on the results of this, it appears that leadership style may be the imperfectly mobile asset linked to follower's commitment. Mata et al. (1995) states that if an organization has an asset that is imperfectly mobile, it will have a sustained competitive advantage. Although the literature on transformational leadership has grown up rapidly over the past 20 years, only a handful of studies have examined how a leader can influence followers to make self-sacrifices, commit to difficult objectives, and achieve much more than what was initially expected. However, these notions have only recently been refined in the literature of organization behavior (Ilies, Judge, & Wagner, 2006). We focus on their conceptual standpoint, the influence that transformational leaders have on the behavioral component of followers' motivation through affective and cognitive processes. It follows that by influencing followers' emotional experiences and their affective states, transformational leaders can induce changes in followers' behavior--influencing them to exert effort on tasks that are important for the organization. Our m...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
