Transformational Leadership and Employee Engagement

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Employee engagement has generated a great deal of interest in recent years as a widely used term in organizations and consulting firms (Macey & Schneider, 2008). Much evidence points to the fact that there is a direct linkage between employee engagement and profitability (Czarnowsky, 2008) and thus organizational performance. Employee engagement has been characterized as a distinct and unique construct that consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components associated with individual role performance (Saks, 2006).

Engagement is the willingness and ability to contribute to company success; the extent to which employees put discretionary effort into their work, in the form of extra time, brainpower and energy (Towers Perrin, 2003).

Strong leadership is believed to influence employee engagement (Towers and Perrin, 2003). Meyer and Allen (2006) found that leadership can be used as an antecedent for organizational commitment. Leadership is regarded as a critical factor in the initiation and implementation of transformations in organizations. The role that every manager must fill in the workplace is thus leadership. Managers often make the assumption that being managers, they are also leaders and that their subordinates’ will automatically follow them (Hall, Guirdy, Mckyer, Outley and Ballard, 2008).

Transformation is defined as a leadership behavior that transforms the norms and values of employees, whereby the leader motivates the workers to perform beyond their expectations (Yukl, 1989). This leadership focuses on the enhancement of followers’ involvement with the goals of the organization (Bass, 1994) leading to employee engagement in the long run. A central aspect of transformational leadership style is the need for change for the benefit of both the individual and organizations they lead. As promoters of change such leaders will influence their subordinates’ to follow in their direction. Transformational leadership acts as a bridge between leaders and followers to develop clear understanding of followers’ interest, values and motivational levels (Bass, 1994).

Although most researches have explored the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational performance (Howell and Avolio, 1993; Pillai and Williams, 2004), few studies have been done on the effects of this leadership style on employee engagement. This is important since despite leadership being important in steering organizations to success, leadership is not complete without followership, and leaders are thus expected to influence followers if they are to achieve organizational objectives (Cropanzo and Mitchel, 2005). The said followers need to be highly committed in their jobs and engaged to their organizations if the stated goals are to be achieved.

Bass (1985) depicted transformational leaders as having four distinct factors; charisma (idealized influence), inspirational motivation, individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation known as the four I’s of transformational leader. Idealized influence refers to behaviors like showing that benefits of the group are more important to leader than benefits of the individual. The leader demonstrates high ethical norms and becomes a role model for the subordinates (Bono and Judge, 2004). Both idealized influence and inspirational motivation of leader (together called charisma) have a positive influence on their followers and can change the self-focus of employees from negative to a positive focus (Lievens et al., 1997). The result is that subordinates become more involved (engaged) with the vision of the leader and are willing to make more sacrifices for that vision (House and Howell, 1992) leading to achievement of organizational goals.

 

List of References

Bono JE, Judge TA (2004). Personality and transformational and transactional leadership: A metaanalysis. J. Appl. Psychol. 89(5):901-910.

Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (Eds.). (1994). Improving organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership. Sage Publications, Inc

Czarnowsky M (2008). Learning’s role in employee engagement. An ASTD research study. Alexandria, V. A. American society for Training and Development

Datche, A. Evelyn*and Mukulu, Elegwa.Issues in Business Management and Economics Vol.3 (1), pp. 9-16, January 2015 The effects of transformational leadership on employee engagement: A survey of civil service in Kenya.

 Hall BM, Guirdy JJ, Mckyer EL, Outley C, Ballard D (2011). Association analysis of reported attitudes and culturally competent behavior engagement among Public health employees. J. Health Disparities Res Pract. 7 (.3):15 – 24

Howell JM., Avolio BJ (1993). Transformational leadership, transactional leadership, locus of control and support for innovation; Key predictors of consolidated business unit performance. Journal of applied Psychology, 78:891-902

Macey WH, Schneider B (2008). The meaning of employee engagement. Industrial and organizational Psychology 1(1): 3-30.

Meyer JD, Allen NJ (2006). A three component conceptualization of organizational commitment. Human Res. Manag. Rev.; 1(1): 61 – 89.

Saks AM, Rotman JL (2006). Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. J. Manag. Psychol. 21 (7) 600-619

Towers Perrin (2003). Working Today: Understanding what drives employee engagement. The 2003 Towers Perrin Talent Report. US

Yukl G, Howell JM (1999). Organizational and contextual influences on the emergence and effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Leadersh. Q. 10: 257-283


 

 

Comments

  1. Neel30 August 2022 at 17:55

    Hi Hakeem , well written article. Osborne and Hammoud (2017)'s research highlights the importance of employee engagement in driving organisational profitability, and enabling customer service skills amongst its employees.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hakeem Haneefa8 September 2022 at 23:33

      Hi Neel, absolutely right, employee engagement and performance of the companies are having positive impact, because when the employee are well engaged the profit of the company also in top level as the customer satisfaction, quality and operations are well managed. To make or maintain their companies’ profitability, leaders of companies must work hard to engage employees (Kortmann et al., 2014).

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  2. Nimshi Ranawana8 September 2022 at 08:31

    Hi Hakeem, well explained. In the research, Popli and Rizvi (2016) emphasized that Employee engagement has now being found as a significant factor which has been treated as a light function of the human resources or training and development departments.This change shows that the top executives have realized that they need to be responsible and accountable for employee engagement, rather than leaving it for HR to action.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hakeem Haneefa8 September 2022 at 23:36

      Agreed with your comment Nimshi ! ). The organization has the responsibility to provide for the needs of employees by providing proper training and building a meaningful workplace environment; in turn, employees have the responsibility to provide a meaningful contribution to the organization. Many organizations perceive the importance of employee engagement; however, the issue of how to increase the level of employee engagement is not warranted (Wang & Chia-Chun, 2013).

      Delete

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