The Influence of Transformational Leadership on Leaders and Followers

In order for a company to be successful and profitable, its managers must display good leadership skills to ensure organizational performance. One well-researched type of leadership is transformational leadership, which includes an emotional attachment between leaders and followers that shapes followers’ goals, values, and beliefs in line with a more motivating vision (Castro, Periñan, & Bueno, 2008; Humphrey; 2014). Transformational leadership has been found to have a significant positive relationship with follower motivation, job satisfaction and job performance (Castro, et al., 2008). We hypothesize that if a manager receives transformational leadership training, there will be a lower turnover rate and higher job satisfaction for both leaders and followers. The current study’s participants will be “top talent” (i.e., top 20% of managers) at a manufacturing company who will be randomly assigned to either 1) leadership training or 2) a control group. Similar to Barling, Weber, & Kelloway (1996), the experimental group will participate in an informational training session followed by group role-playing exercises designed to identify and increase transformational leadership behaviors. The control group will only participate in the informational session. We expect that our hypotheses will be supported and that more top talent and followers will be retained when managers attend the leadership training and that these leaders and followers will have greater employee satisfaction