The relationship of the transformational leadership process and group mood among musicians and their effects on artistic quality within the American orchestral organization

The desire to understand the American classical music experience and its relationship to transformational leadership is the foundational reason for this study. The experience of listening to the same orchestra under the direction of nine different conductors throughout the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera’s conductor search, led to an interest in further understanding the processes involved in the classical musical experience. There is minimal research focused on the American symphony orchestra and an acute lack of research on leadership processes within the American symphony orchestra. Examination and study of the leadership process between conductor and musician, musician group mood, and artistic quality are all considerations in understanding the classical musical experience. The research design for this study was a quantitative design using simple correlation analysis. The intent of this study was to understand how the independent and dependent variables covary, and therefore a non-experimental, associational approach was used (Gliner, Morgan, & Leech, 2009). Given the two independent variables within this study, the conductor’s transformational leadership and musician group mood, associational inferential statistics was used to analyze the data collected (Gliner et al., 2009). The Pearson correlation coefficient, ANOVA, and the t-test, were used to accept or reject each hypothesis. The CSO musicians served as the population for this study. The 135-item research questionnaire used in the Boerner and Von Streit (2007) study was used to examine the relationship between the variables of transformational leadership, artistic quality, and musician group mood. The data analysis did not show a relationship of significance between the conductor’s transformational leadership and perception of artistic quality or between the conductor’s transformational leadership and musician group mood. The data analysis did show a significant relationship between musicians’ positive group mood and artistic quality. Symphonic music and group mood are collaborative, collective, and social in nature (Becker, 1974). Data from this study show that a harmonized group mood of the musicians has a positive relationship to the perception of artistic quality