Peer review on leadership Essay

The journal article that was selected selected explored the possible influences of situational moderators on the effectiveness of Transformational Leadership. It is one of several articles found to be focused on this type of leadership and its relationship to employee motivation. By definition, transformation leadership involves the practice of altering the thoughts and attitudes of employees or subordinates to motivate them to perform beyond what is expected of them (Bass, 1985). The journal article â€Å"Follower Motive Patterns as Situational Moderators for Transformational Leadership Effectiveness† (Goodwin, Whittington, & Wofford, 2001) argued that the effects of transformational leadership outcomes could be determined by situational factors. Whereas other areas of leadership research had been explored on such situational aspects, the authors stated that there is a lack of research on situational determinants for Transformational leadership. To be specific, they identified subordinate motive factors such as growth need strength and need for autonomy as the independent factors for their study based on a brief but relevant literature review. They hypothesized that these two factors would have positive significant correlations with transformational leadership effectiveness. Their method consisted of having participants (managers and subordinates) from a U. S. government engineering services agency answer several scaled questionnaires. These included the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire-5X (MLQ), a 5-point scale assessment of leader effectiveness, Job Description Index (JDI), growth need strength assessment scale developed by Hackman and Oldham (1974 in Goodwin, et al 2001) and the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) by Edwards (1953 in Goodwin, et al 2001). The researches used multiple regression analyses and within-and-between analysis WABA) to generate the results of their study. The findings showed that when the growth need strength was high, groups of subordinates were assessed to be more effective by leaders who were rated as transformational. Similarly, leaders assessed as transformational appraised their groups as more effective when the need for autonomy was high. These results supported the authors’ hypothesis which led them to conclude that situational moderators such as individual motive patterns indeed have influence over the effectiveness of transformational leadership. The study was a significant contribution to the idea that transformational leadership could be integrated to other paradigms. While the study was limited to only two potential situational moderators, the researches gave strong indications that there could be other situational factors such as task, group, and organizational characteristics that could be examined in future research undertakings.