Transformational leadership and contextual performance

Abstract

Purpose Transformational leaders engage their employees’ self-concept in such a meaningful way that it results in an extra effort exerted by employees in addition to what is expected of them. This extra effort or pro-social behavior leads to contextual performance (CP) which supplements the individual’s task performance and lead to superior organizational performance. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the influence of transformational leadership (TL) on employees’ CP. The paper also tests the moderating role of integrity on the relationship between TL and CP. Design/methodology/approach Data were gathered through self-administered questionnaires from 480 Indian information technology (IT) employees across India. Harman’s single-factor test was used through analysis of moment structures (AMOS 20.0) to test the bias associated due to common method variance. Regression analysis was carried out through a series of hierarchical models in SPSS 20.0 to test the direct and interactive effect of integrity between TL and CP. Findings The result supports the assertion that TL has a positive influence on employees’ CP. However, the moderational effect of integrity on the relationship between TL and CP was found to be insignificant. Practical implications The findings of the study have confirmed that employees deriving higher degree of integrity at work will engage in discretionary behaviors and they are more likely open to organizational changes and improvement. The IT organizations may take clues from the findings of the study for creating conducive working environment where affective organizational commitment can influence the CP and job satisfaction. Originality/value This study is critical in a sense that as the Indian IT industry has one of the highest turnover rates in the service industry, it would take a strong and compelling reason for the IT professionals to stay committed to the organization, derive satisfaction at work and help peers and others by engaging in extra role of CP.

How is responsible leadership related to the three-component model of organisational commitment?

“…Applying SITL (Hogg, 2001;Hogg and van Knippenberg, 2003), this paper reports the results of the relationship between RL and the three-component model of organisational commitment. Similar to previous studies focussing on productivity and performance management (Ribeiro et al, 2018;Pradhan et al, 2018;Karia and Abu, 2019), this paper makes a significant contribution to the literature of RL and employee motivation by examining a novel theoretical model of leadership. Future research could examine the antecedents of RL that might have a significant impact on employee commitment.…”

“…This paper argues that RL will promote employees' three dimensions of organisational commitment because of the following two reasons. First, in contrast to other forms of leadership such as transformational (Pradhan et al , 2018) or ethical leadership (Kalshoven et al , 2016), RL considers the social-relational process of its employees (as the primary stakeholder) to establish responsible organisations. According to Doh et al (2011), RL creates a stakeholder culture where employees can derive the meaning of responsibility and organisational identity and which promotes social initiatives to attract employees to the leader and organisation.…”

“…The associations among leadership approaches and employees' motivation have been examined in several organisational studies. However, there is lack of empirical evidence on RL as most of the studies are restricted to other value-based leadership such as transformational (Pradhan et al , 2018), ethical (Kalshoven et al , 2016) or servant leadership (Yingying and Qing, 2014). Only a few studies have examined RL and its impact on employees' behavioural outcomes (Miska and Mendenhall, 2018; Haque et al , 2019).…”

“…Hence, many researchers try to find employees' motivation from the perspective of leadership. These include several value-based leadership practices such as ethical leadership (Kalshoven et al , 2016) and transformational leadership (Graham et al , 2015; Pradhan et al , 2018); however, very little is known about the role of RL from the perspective of SITL (Hogg, 2001; Hogg and van Knippenberg, 2003). A limited number of studies support the association of RL with organisational commitment (Maak and Pless, 2006; Haque et al , 2019).…”

The Relation of Social Identity and Transformational Leadership in Project Teams: An Examination in the IT Industry in Germany.

“…Providing collective goals and the expectation of performance by transformational leaders, where individual and social identity and collective performance is induced, is also supported by other studies (Akbari et al, 2017;Chang et al, 2017;Pradhan et al, 2018), including the Indian IT industry (Pradhan et al, 2018). Proper communication is essential to influence collective goals (Akbari et al, 2017), and project artefacts such as plans on whiteboards make goals visible for the team and support identity work in projects (Brown, 2017;Paring et al, 2017).…”