How transformational leadership influences follower helping behavior: The role of trust and prosocial motivation

Abstract

We proposed and tested a moderated mediation model that jointly examines affect-based and cognition-based trust as the mediators and prosocial motivation as the moderator in relationships between transformational leadership and followers' helping behavior towards coworkers. Data were collected from 348 sales and servicing employees and their supervisors in four private retail companies and five private manufacturing companies located in Southeast China. The results showed that both affect-based trust and cognition-based trust mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and followers' helping behavior towards coworkers. Furthermore, moderated mediation analyses showed that affect-based trust mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and followers' helping behavior towards coworkers only among employees with high prosocial motivation, whereas cognition-based trust mediated this relationship among only those with low prosocial motivation. Implications for the theory and practice of leadership are then discussed.

Exploring the Neuropsychological Antecedents of Transformational Leadership: the Role of Executive Function

“…Thus mental flexibility may enable transformational leaders to appeal to a spectrum of prosocial motivations (Grant and Sumanth 2009) in their followers, by displaying individualized consideration. They may be able to tap into reciprocal norms, and inspire affect-based trust in followers who are high in prosocial motivation, by getting these employees to discharge their obligations of reciprocity; on the other hand, they may appeal to followers' calculation of personal gain and cognitive -based trust in those employees low in pro-social motivation (Zhu and Akhtar 2014).…”

“…While emerging research explores how leaders may facilitate prosocial behaviors in their followers (Zhu and Akhtar 2014), more exploration is needed into those antecedents that engender prosocial approaches within transformational leaders. The intrinsic motivation to continuously and repeatedly make prosocial choices and decisions that benefit the common good requires persistence , known in the neuropsychological literature as cognitive control.…”

The downside of transformational leadership when encouraging followers to network

“…If individualized consideration is coupled with intellectual stimulation, then the developmental opportunities provided will be challenging, creative, and exploratory, requiring knowledge from external rather than internal sources. Followers who directly benefit from leaders' individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation have a higher level of trust and reciprocity (Howell & Hall-Merenda, 1999;Lee, 2005;Zhu & Akhtar, 2014), and they are more likely to meet people in their leaders' social networks (Bono & Anderson, 2005), especially those outside of their unit or division. Further, they are likely to meet more people if the leader is more transformational.…”

Reform in public organizations: the roles of ambidextrous leadership and moderating mechanisms

“…Besides, the appearance of these two moderators in our research model of reform also indicates the convergence between workplace behaviour theory, leadership and reform research streams. Differing from prior leadership research that mirrors the interaction between leadership and prosocial motivation in engendering employee behaviour (Zhu and Akhtar 2014), our research unveils the interactions between ambidextrous leadership, RBSE and PSM in predicting public-oriented dynamic capabilities, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the reform strategy.…”