The effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles on the influencing behaviour of subordinate police officers

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to investigate the influencing behaviour of subordinates as a function of supervisor leadership style within a law enforcement setting. Fifty‐three subordinate police officers returned one of four randomly distributed scenarios depicting either a male—female transformational or male—female transactional leader (supervising officer). The subordinate police officers then completed the Profile of Organizational Influence Strategies—Form M (Kipnis & Schmidt, 1982) indicating the extent to which they would use rational, soft and hard approaches to influence their supervising officer as illustrated in the scenario. It was hypothesized that transactional leadership would be more closely associated with the three police officer influencing approaches than transformational leadership. Contrary to the prediction, transformational leadership was determined to be more closely related with subordinate rational influencing behaviour than transactional leadership. The findings are discussed in terms of the nature of transformational leadership and the unique characteristics of the police officer culture.

Captain's leadership type and police officers' compliance to power bases

“…With a transformational leader, subordinates resort to soft or more personal approaches whereas with transactional leaders, they resort predominantly to bargaining and rational influencing techniques. In another study on subordinate police officers, Deluga and Souza (1991) found that compared to transactional leadership, transformational leadership was more closely related to subordinate rational influencing behaviour. Finally, Hollander and Offermann (1990) state that transformational leaders can be identified by the impact they have on followers.…”

Rally the troops or make the trains run on time: the relative importance and interaction of contingent reward and transformational leadership

“…Most other studies (Deluga, 1988;Bass, 1990b;Ehrlich et al, 1990;Deluga and Souza, 1991) compared transformational and transactional leadership and found the former significantly superior to the latter on a variety of criterion measures.…”

Effectiveness of a moral and benevolent leader: Probing the interactions of the dimensions of paternalistic leadership

“…This method was widely adopted in research regarding leadership decision-making (Zhou & Martocchio, 2001), leadership effectiveness (Deluga & Souza, 1991;Knippenberg & Knippenberg, 2005) and subordinate perception (Trempe, Rigny, & Haccoun, 1985). Via our experimental design, we attempt to better investigate the interactive effects of leader's authoritarianism, benevolence and morality.…”