INTRODUCTION

Research from the past several decades suggests that employees’ organizational commitment should be a central concern for public managers because it can be an effective tool for improving public employees’ work attitudes, job satisfaction and retention (Porter, Crampon, and Smith 1976; Meyer et al. 2002; Park and Rainey 2007). Moreover the literature suggests that managers’ organizational commitment can spill over to their employees’ organizational commitment, because organizationally committed managers provide a supportive work environment (Meyer et al. 2002; Eisenberger et al. 1986; Buchanan 1974) and signal how critical values can be translated into acceptable behavior (Paarlberg and Lavigna 2010). However, we are yet to understand if and how public managers can influence employees’ organizational commitment through their own commitment (Meyer et al. 2002; Solinger, van Olffen, and Roe 2008). Organizational commitment describes an individual’s sense of belonging to an organization, somanagers’ organizational commitment is not necessarily observable for employees. We argue that managers’ organizational commitment is indeed valuable in order to ensure the employees’ commitment to the organization’s goals and values, but that this relationship is dependent on how transformational leadership is enacted. Several studies have underlined how transformational leadership matters for employees’ organizational commitment (Walumbwa et al. 2005; Bass and Riggio 2006) not least in a public context (Trottier, Van Wart, and Wang 2008), and we extend and nuance this knowledge by arguing that transformational leadership can also decide how managers’ commitment convey commitment to employees. Hereby this study meets calls for “theory-based” models of organizational commitment that will advance our knowledge on mediating mechanisms and offer public managers more usable insights on how to use the commitment literature (Mathieu and Zajac 1990; Meyer et al. 2002) Our theoretical expectation is that transformational leadership accentuates a manager’s organizational commitment only when a manager deliberately exerts transformational leadership and this is perceived by the employees. We know from the self-other agreement of leadership literature that managers and employees often differ in their perceptions of leadership, and that agreement between managers and employees on leadership is important for how effective a leader is (Atwater and Yammarino 1992, 1997; Fleenor et al. 2010). On this background we propose a theoretical model that distinguishes “transformational managers”, who perform transformational leadership intentionally and are perceived as such by their employees, from three other types of leaders, who are not perceived as transformational leaders or unrealistic about their transformational leadership (“reticent managers”, “detached managers”, and “overrating managers”). In accordance with the self-other agreement literature (Yammarino & Atwater, 1997), we only expect a positive relationship between manager and employees’ organizational commitment when managers are seen as transformational leaders and are selfaware about how transformational they are (“transformational managers”). If these criteria are not met, we expect that managers’ organizational commitment will at best be unrelated and most likely negatively related with employees’ organizational commitment, because these managers either lack self-awareness and interpersonal orientation or are not clarifying organizational goals.