A review of leadership theories: identifying a lack of growth in the HRD leadership domain

Linkages of organizational commitment and leadership styles: a systematic review

Purpose

This paper aims to examine how the linkages between organizational commitment (OC) and five leadership styles, namely, authentic leadership, benevolent leadership, ethical leadership, moral leadership and spiritual leadership, have been investigated in the literature.

Design/methodology/approach

This systematic literature review applies a matrix method to examine the significant literature in leadership and OC, specifically considering themes of self-development, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-discipline and self-motivation necessary for individuals and organizations. The papers from Australian Business Deans Council, Scopus and Web of Science listed journals were reviewed. Forty-three peer-reviewed English publications from 20 journals were selected and analysed.

Findings

The synthesis of these empirical studies revealed that the relationship between OC and these leadership styles had primarily been mostly quantitatively investigated in many countries and sectors. Additionally, ethical leadership remains the most commonly researched style. Furthermore, there are mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions in the relationship between these styles and OC.

Research limitations/implications

The literature search in this study was mainly focused on English articles only; therefore, some papers in other languages may not have been included. Additional qualitative studies based on these linkage themes need to be conducted in human resource development (HRD) contexts.

Practical implications

This review offers an overall picture of the existing knowledge of OC and leadership that will be fruitful for HRD practitioners to understand and replicate these concepts.

Originality/value

There are few systematic literature reviews on the relationship between OC and leadership styles. This paper is among the first systematic reviews to analyse how leadership has been associated with OC and provides potential research directions. HRD practitioners and academia should find the results of this study helpful.

Teacher’s Emotional Intelligence and Employee Brand-Based Equity: Mediating Role of Teaching Performance and Teacher’s Self-Efficacy

Educational institutions need to respond to global competitive problems, and branding has become a method for higher education institutions to differentiate themselves. Thus, this study attempted to investigate predictors of employee brand-based equity. A cross-sectional research design has been used to record the perception of the teachers, and data are collected using a convenience sampling technique. Before administrating the study on large scale, a pilot testing was conducted, and reliability of the scale and their items was ensured. Pilot testing results indicated a satisfactory reliability level, and constructs correlations were in the assumed directions, which allowed to conduct the study on a large scale. A sample size of 400 was set, and questionnaires were distributed among the participants, out of which, 376 were received back, while 351 were left at the end after discarding incomplete responses. The left over and completed questionnaires indicate 88% response rate. Data have been analyzed through the Smart PLS software by applying the structural equation modeling technique. After establishment of the measurement model through reliability and validity, the structural model was used to test study hypotheses. All the study hypotheses were found statistically significant on the basis of t and p statistics. Results indicate that teacher’s emotional intelligence enhances teachers’ self-efficacy, which further improves their brand-based equity. Similarly, emotional intelligence increases teacher’s performance, which also increases their brand-based equity. Limitations and future directions of the study are also reported.

Structural relationships among transformational leadership, affective organizational commitment, and job performance: the mediating role of employee engagement

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural relationships among transformational leadership, affective organizational commitment and job performance, as well as the mediating effect of employee engagement on their relationships.

Design/methodology/approach

To examine the structural relationships among the research variables, structural equation modeling analysis and bootstrap estimates were performed using the data of 600 full-time employees working in Korean private organizations.

Findings

The results of the data analysis suggest that transformational leadership had a significant impact on employee affective organizational commitment and job performance through employee engagement as a mediator. Specifically, employee engagement partially mediated the mechanism in which transformational leadership affects employee affective organizational commitment, whereas there existed a full mediation of the association between transformational leadership and job performance.

Practical implications

The study finding suggested that transformational leadership was the key catalyst in both encouraging affective organizational commitment and task performance of employees throughout the mediator, employee engagement. Thus, organizations need to create a safe and positive environment that promotes employee engagement and should offer interventions for leaders to build skill sets of transformational leadership.

Originality/value

Because previous studies had explored the impacts of transformational leadership on employee positive attitude and job performance separately, there is little known about how these three constructs correlate. By investigating the impacts of transformational leadership on attitude and performance simultaneously in this study, this study expanded to the extant literature by providing better understanding of transformational leadership. Moreover, given that articles on transformational leadership have been limited in the HRD literature, findings of this study can offer trustworthy information for HRD practice and encourage HRD scholars to explore transformational leadership-related research.

The impact of servant leadership and transformational leadership on learning organization: a comparative analysis

Purpose

Leadership has a powerful influence on learning and development in today's organizations. Various types of leadership have been found to be conducive to building a learning organization. This empirical study compared the effect of transformational and servant leadership on a learning organization (an organization that constantly transforms itself using learning and development techniques) in the context of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Design/methodology/approach

Four proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Findings

The results show that servant leadership has no significant relationship to learning organization, whereas transformational leadership is a strong predictor.

Originality/value

This research compares two different leadership styles and presents theoretical and practical implications for scholars and practitioners. In particular, this study advances our understanding of how and which leadership style relates to learning organization by examining a structural model with three latent variables: servant leadership, transformational leadership, and learning organization.

Employee Adaptive Performance and Its Antecedents: Review and Synthesis

The purpose of this article is to critically review current studies on employees’ adaptive performance and to integrate the findings to provide insights on how to develop employees’ adaptability. It also aims to identify gaps in the research to guide future studies on adaptive performance in the field of human resource development. By reviewing 34 empirical studies on adaptive performance published between 1999 and 2016, we identified 22 antecedents of adaptive performance at the individual (nine), job (six), group (three), and organizational (four) levels. Our analyses reveal that a significant amount of research has focused more on individual characteristics than on other aspects affecting employees’ high adaptive performance. Discussion, implications, and recommendations for future research are elaborated.