مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد رهبری تحول گرا و تعهد سازمانی – امرالد 2018

Leadership is one of the key functions of organizational management, since a strong leadership can help organizations in their permanent struggle to be increasingly competitive, as it helps to align people, timing and resources to achieve organizational goals (Avolio, 1999). Leadership can be defined as the relationship established between an individual (the leader) and a group (the followers) such as group behavior is directed or determined by the leader (Shastri et al., 2010). Leaders can use different styles to exert influence on followers. The dominant approach in leadership literature has been to consider two distinct styles of leadership: transformational and transactional (Bass and Avolio, 1993). While the main tool of transactional leadership to motivate employees is tangible rewards (money and status), transformational leaders use also intangible rewards (personal development, recognition, self-esteem enhancement). Extant research (Yammarino et al., 1993; Wang et al., 2011) has shown that transformational leadership styles are more effective than transactional to motivate employees and to enhance organizational performance. One of the desired outcomes of leadership is a team of employees committed to the organization. Organizational commitment is defined as a psychological state that binds the individual to the organization (Allen and Meyer, 1990). Some of the beneficial outcomes of organizational commitment detected in the literature are, among others, turnover reduction (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990), organizational citizenship behaviors (Simo et al., 2014), job satisfaction (Currivan, 2000) and career development (Enache et al., 2013). As organizational commitment may be a desired outcome of transformational leadership, many attempts have been made to empirically establish a relationship between both constructs (e.g. Rafferty and Griffin, 2004; Avolio et al., 2004; Lee, 2005; Limsila and Ogunlana, 2008; Lo et al., 2010; Joo et al., 2012; Clinebell et al., 2013). This stream of research has two main drawbacks. On the one hand, while most of this research treats transformational leadership and organizational commitment as non-dimensional, both are dimensional constructs, which represent differences in leadership styles and different bonds of the individual with the organization, respectively. Models that take into account dimensionality of constructs can lead to a more precise understanding of the mechanisms of creation of commitment through leadership (Rafferty and Griffin, 2004). On the other hand, the mechanisms by which transformational leaders influence their followers have not been studied in a systematic manner (Avolio et al., 2004; Castro et al., 2008), and several authors have suggested that greater attention should be paid to understand how these influential processes operate in transformational leadership (e.g. Bass, 1998, Conger et al., 2000; Kark and Shamir, 2002; Keskes, 2014a).