The generalizability of transformational leadership across cultures: a metaanalysis Abstract Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors are moderated by a country's cultural values and cultural practices.Design/methodology/approach The authors describe a meta-analytic review of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee performance (task performance and OCBs) using data from over 57,000 individuals, 215 samples and 34 countries. The authors examine whether this relationship is moderated by the cultural values and practices of the country in which the study was located -after first controlling for methodological factors.Findings The authors find that cultural values and practices moderate the transformational leadershipemployee performance relationship such that the relationship is much stronger in countries whose culture is incongruent with transformational leadership.Research limitations/implications Data were only available for 34 countries and it is unclear what role industry type and job type play in determining transformational leadership effectiveness or if these situational variables are confounded with culture. The findings call into question the generalizability of transformational leadership across countries and cultures.Practical implications The findings suggest that the value of transformational leadership behaviors may be limited in developed economies such as Western Europe and North America, while transformational leadership is most effective in Africa, the Middle East, South America and parts of Southeast Asia.Originality/value This is the first paper to examine the generalizability of transformational leadership across 34 countries and is by far the largest review ever conducted into the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate performance.

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The job demands-control (JDC) model suggests that job demands and job control (job autonomy) combine interactively in predicting job-related outcomes. While the model has been widely tested, studies using it have often failed to demonstrate the predicted interaction effects of job demands and job control on measures of a wide range of outcomes. The current study proposes performance feedback as a different situational variable that could relate to job demands and job control, and examines the three-way interaction effects among role ambiguity, performance feedback, and job autonomy in predicting employee satisfaction. Analyzing data from the 2012 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, the study finds that performance feedback mitigates the negative effect of role ambiguity on employee satisfaction, but is significantly stronger in the high job autonomy condition. This study contributes to theoretical knowledge of the way job demands and job autonomy interact in producing motivational outcomes by offering a plausible explanation for the lack of consistency of the interaction effect of job demands and job control in the JDC model.

Human resource practices requiring employee participation or involvement in work-related decision-making have been commonly believed to be beneficial to work outcomes; however, we suggest that the effects of those practices on work outcomes can be limited by individual preferences, which influence the perceived quality of supervision. Drawing upon prior research on work structure, person–environment (P-E) fit perspective, and perceived organizational support, we examine the joint effects of autonomy and preference for autonomy on employee work outcomes (task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors) that are mediated via perceived supervision (individualized consideration) among U.S. state government employees. The results showed that the congruence between autonomy and preference for autonomy was associated with the highest level of perceived individualized consideration by supervisors, highlighting the important role played by perceptions of the supervisor behavior in promoting employees’ positive attitudes at work.