Management Science and Research June 2014, Volume 3, Issue 2, PP.34-39
Empirical Study on the Relation between Transformation Leadership and Career Success Liqin Zhang School of Business, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, 130117, P. R. China Email: zhangliqin210@163.com
Abstract In recent years, leadership theory researchers have done many studies on transformation leadership; moreover, the studies on its working mechanism and its influence on organizations continue. However, few researches are done on the relation between transformation leadership and career success. Therefore, this paper by conducting empirical study on 227 participants, tries to dig deeper about this relation. And the result shows that transformation leadership has a significant positive influence on career success. This paper is conducive to in-depth study on influential factors on career success and also offers a new perspective in studying the working mechanism of transformation leadership. Keywords: Transformation Leadership; Career Success; Empirical Study
1 INTRODUCTION Enterprises, being a way to reduce social cost, take profit maximization as their goal which is also consistent with their employees’ personal goals. As information technology and economic integration keep developing, the competition among enterprises is increasingly fierce; as a result, the administrators are trying their utmost to achieve their goals. The employees are a part of a company, so their career success is crucial to the realization of the whole company’s goal. Therefore, the administrators begin to attach more importance to it. To survive, compete, develop and take the lead under a fierce circumstance, an organization should have more innovation and creativity than before (Tierneyetal; 1999; Jungetai., 2003). The improvement of employees’ performance and their satisfaction, the reduction of their turnover rate, and the encouragement to their creativity are beneficial to improve an organization’s core competitiveness without doubt [1]. When individual development contradicts with organizational development, the effective management of administrators of all levels towards their subordinates is vital to the company’s development. By strengthening their leadership styles, the administrators ought to offer their subordinates guidance, support and care so as to improve their self-efficacy and tenacity. Luthans, et al (2003) believes be it leaders or employees, tenacity can be accumulated from top to bottom. When increasing the employees’ tenacity, the leader’s firm and tenacious personality is of great importance. Nabi (2001) finds out that a leader’s support is closely related to an employee’s subjective career success, while the support from Human Resources Department is closely related to an employee’s objective career success. An organization’s support and care may push forward its employees to make more efforts in their career development (Rhoades, Eisenberger, 2002). A great deal of research shows that effective leadership positively influences the performance of the company and the working attitudes and behavior of its employees. As to which kind of leadership works better to correctly guide the employees’ career development, according to relevant western leadership theories, transformation leadership is the answer. In recent years, China has done more studies on leadership styles and leaders’ behavior and achieved fruitful results. For example, Chaoping Li and Kan Shi, who are coming from Chinese Academy of Science, have conducted in-depth study on the relation between transformation leadership and leadership effectiveness by initiating relevant questionaries. Moreover, they have also discussed about transformation leadership’s function in organization dimension. Besides that, they have talked about psychological empowerment’s role in the relation - 34 www.ivypub.org/msr
between transformation leadership and turnover rate, organization commitment, job satisfaction and leadership effectiveness. Considering that an employee’s career success includes job satisfaction, job performance, and selfefficacy and so on, it is necessary to research on how transformation leadership influences the career success of the employees.
2 THEORIES AND HYPOTHESIS According to Burn (1978), leaders act as mentors, guiding followers to self-improvement, interacting with followers, working together with them and making each other advance to a higher level of need and motivation [2]. The research of Dreher and Ash (1990) describes that mentor system is connected with career success both subjectively and objectively. Bass (1985) argues transformational leaders are those who make followers take greater ownership for their work, convey the importance of their tasks, and give them individual consideration which is that leaders attend to every follower’s need, ability and perspective, listen carefully and coach individually[3]. Noe (1996) considers the support of leader will influence follower’s career development, achievement and success. Accordingly, the support of supervisor or colleague can increase the career satisfaction and occupational success in employees. Nabi (2001) discovers that individual support is closely related to female subjective career success, supervisor support is connected with subjective career success, and the support of personnel department has significant relations with objective career success. Organization’s attention and support inspire employees to invest more effort on career development. Burke and Collins (2001) have researched into the mechanism between mentor relationship and individual career success, and drawn out that mentor system can help individuals gain success subjectively and objectively (Drdier & Ash (1990)). Bozicmelos (2003) also finds that mentor system, formal or not, can assist employees in adopting to work, improve their career satisfaction, and affect their personnel subjective career success. Transformational leaders increase followers’ advanced needs and motivations constantly[4], unify individual and organizational goals, inspire followers to be more engaging through sharing, involving, motivating together with individual considerations (Leith wood, 1992). Luthans (2003) concludes through empirical study that the toughness of leader plays a significant role in strengthening employee’s toughness. He holds that from leader to follower, toughness has a addictive/ combined effect coming from above, which means leaders have the ability and motivation to coach their followers, encourage the behaviour of mutually benefiting[5]. Optimism might show Contagion Effects or move up and down spirally. In 2005, Harland points out that in transformational leadership system, leader’s charisma, individual consideration, appealing etc., have positive correlation with followers’ toughness. According to Luthans (2007), other than material incentive, the support from supervisor has integral influence on employees’ perspective. Lacking of supervisor’s support, important goals are difficult to achieve no matter how strong the employee’s willingness is[6]. Leadership behavior is closely linked with employee’s career. It is proved by some scholars that leadership behavior can be used to predict career satisfaction effectively. Fehmidah (2008) claims transformational leadership can reduce pressure and depression of employees. Through the investigation to 240 employees in Islamabad and empirical study, Riaz (2010) obtains that transformational leadership has dramatic positive impact on career satisfaction of employees. A lot of researches prove the positive correlation between leadership and employees’ work attitude, performance(Wang, Law, Hackett, Wang & Chen,2005；Avolio, Zhu, Kohl &Bhatia,2004；Shin & Zhou, 2003； Dvir et al., 2002). Domestic scholar Congwei Xu analyses 15 years’ existing data at home and abroad about transformational and career satisfaction by applying meta-analysis. The results illustrate that the degree of how transformational leadership influences career satisfaction varies in western and eastern culture and the positive correlation between those two is more obvious in eastern culture. The characters transformational leadership behavior shows: building strong emotional bond with followers and keeping effective communication[7]; heightening the improvement of employees’ professional knowledge, communication skills, adoptive capability; attending to followers’ needs and emotion, helping them develop; inspiring followers to challenge and go beyond self, making effort to achieve more; advancing their value, need and potential[8]. Those characters have a positive influence on encouraging employees’ career success. Numerous document indicate that work performance, employee self -efficacy, organization commitment and - 35 www.ivypub.org/msr
organizational citizenship behavior which connect firmly with number of promotion and payment, are positively affected by transformational leadership[9]. Number of promotion and payment belong to objective career domain. Consequently, transformational leadership has positive correlation with career success. Furthermore, work and career satisfaction which are affected by transformational leadership, are standards for judging career subjective success of employees. Therefore, transformational leadership can affect subjective career success. Based on researches above, here comes research hypothesis of this article: Hypothesis: Transformational leadership and employee career success have significant positive correlation.
3 METHOD 3.1 Sample, Settings, and Tool This study is based on individual employees. The data for our study is collected by distributing translation and paper questionnaire, network questionnaire survey, trusting others to distribute and so on. There are 320 employees involved in the investigation, recycling 310 questionnaires, of which 277 return usable surveys (a response rate of 86.6 percent). The employees involved are in a wide variety of jobs organized mainly in a traditional functional structure that included research and development, manufacturing, warehousing, sales and marketing, and general administration. In this research, scale mainly comes from western literature. All the scale of the questionnaire has been verified to be in good reliability and validity under the background of China. Participants responded to the following items using a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). We average the items representing each construct to form scales, with higher scores denoting greater standing on the construct of interest. Transformational leadership scale uses the TLQ （ Transformational Leadership Questionnaire ） organized by Chaoping Li and Shi kan (2005), totally 26 items. Career success scale starts from the subjective and objective aspects of career success at the same time, defining the structure of the career success of career satisfaction and career competitiveness. Career satisfaction uses the scale in 《Effects of Race on Organizational Experiences, Jobperformance Evaluations, and Career Outcomes》 by Greenhaus, et al (1990), totally 5 items. The scale is the most widely used professional satisfaction scale. Career competitiveness uses the scale in《predictor of Success in the Era of Boundaryless Careers》 by Eby, Butts and Lockwood （2003）, including internal market competitive awareness and external market competitive awareness, totally 6 items.
3.2 Reliability validity test and correlation analysis We test reliability and validity for each scale through SPSS software. Reliability refers to the consistency, the stability and reliability of the measurement result. In the study of sociology, scholars generally use an internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach Alpha) as the measure of reliability indicators. The alpha coefficient reaches 0.7 or above, then the scale has good reliability. Results show that transformational leadership scale based on the standardization of the overall reliability coefficient is 0.948, and the test results show each entry deleted will not increase the reliability of the questionnaire. Therefore, the reliability of transformational leadership scale is high, and the measurement result is stable and reliable. Employees' career success scale based on standardized overall reliability coefficient is 0.857, and the test results show that each entry deleted will not increase the reliability of the questionnaire. So the scale has good reliability. This paper uses principal component analysis method and orthogonal varimax rotation method to rotate each factor. From table of factor analysis of factor loading matrix, each factors loading is significantly greater than 0.5, which conforming to the requirements of the statistics, so the scale has good structure validity. It is generally believed that Pearson correlation coefficient is greater than 0.2, the basic can explain the correlation between variables. Table 3 shows the overall correlation analysis results of transformational leadership and employee's career success. It can be seen from the table that transformational leadership and employee career success at the 0.01 level are significantly related, and the correlation coefficient is 0.32. This provides research foundation to the hypothesis of this article. - 36 www.ivypub.org/msr
TABLE 1 TL ROTATED COMPONENT MATRIX Items TL1 TL 2 TL 3 TL 4 TL 5 TL 6 TL 7 TL 8 TL 9 TL 10 TL 11 TL 12 TL 13 TL 14 TL 15 TL 16 TL 17 TL 18 TL 19 TL 20 TL 21 TL 22 TL 23 TL 24 TL 25 TL 26
Component 1 0.702 0.727 0.809 0.727 0.792 0.585 0.583 0.572
2
3
4
0.704 0.795 0.791 0.843 0.770 0.694 0.682 0.646 0.737 0.645 0.705 0.657 0.732 0.633 0.767 0.792 0.738 0.672
TABLE 2 CS ROTATED COMPONENT MATRIX Items
Component 2
1 0.679 0.656 0.790 0.772 0.472
CS 1 CS 2 CS 3 CS 4 CS 5 CS 6 CS 7 CS 8 CS 9 CS 10 CS 11
3
0.830 0.853 0.668 0.876 0.805 0.611
TABLE 3 MEANS, STANDARD DEVIATIONS, AND CORRELATIONS Means 1.TL
3.7023
Standard Deviations 0.66427
2.CS
3.4125
0.57503
TL 0.320（**）
CS
1 1
**Coefficient is significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).
3.3 Regression In this paper, we use SPSS software regression analysis to test hypothesis. From table 4 and table 5, the influence of transformational leadership on employee career success is significant, and the significance is 0.000; β is 0.277. This result verified the assumption of transformational leadership and employees is significantly positively related to career success. - 37 www.ivypub.org/msr
TABLE 4 ANOVAA
1
Model Regression Residual
Total a. Dependent Variable: CS b. Predictors: (Constant), TL
Sum of Squares 9.322 81.942
df 1 275
91.263
276
Mean Square 9.322 0.298
F 31.284
Sig. 0.000b
TABLE 5 COEFFICIENTS Unstandardized Coefficients B Std. Error 3.556E-005 0.033 (Constant) 0.277 0.049 TL a. Dependent Variable: CS Model
Standardized Coefficients Beta 0.320
t
Sig.
0.001 5.593
0.999 0.000
4 CONCLUSIONS Results of this study indicate that transformational leadership and career success are significantly correlated. Regression analysis results show the transformational leadership (TL) has a positive effect on career success (CS), and there is a significant positive correlation between them. These conclusions explaining the relationship between transformational leadership and career success provides experience support in China. The real organization situation in the Chinese culture is embedded as the research background to investigate transformational leadership style and its action mechanism in depth, and to explore the uniqueness transformational leadership style of Chinese situation. A large number of studies have shown that transformational leadership has a positive effect on work performance, employee’s self-effectiveness sense, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, as well as employee’s job satisfaction, work attitude and work behavior. Among those, work performance, employee’s selfeffectiveness sense, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior are inseparable from the number of promotions and payment which are the objective aspects of career, while work satisfaction and career satisfaction are the measurement criteria of subjective career success. However, there is no empirical research to prove the relationship between transformational leadership and career success. So this survey, which focuses on the relationship between transformational leadership and career success, possesses theoretical innovation. This research confirms the important relation between transformational leadership and career success, which provides enterprise's organization and management with certain enlightenment: Managers need to give guidance to employees for their career success; employee's personal career success is inseparable from the improvement of enterprise performance and enterprise's core competence. Furthermore, it offers our country enterprise operators; especially enterprise managers a reference how to manage employees better to realize a win-win situation between employees and the enterprise. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how our country enterprise strengthens the leadership effectiveness in order to realize the employees' career success. On the one hand, it enriches the theoretical basis; on the other hand, it provides reference of effective management for the enterprise to improve the competitiveness, and provides enterprise managers with insights for better enterprise performance.
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AUTHORS 1Liqin
Zhang: Chongqing, 1990/1/10. School of Business, Northeast Normal University, 2015 master, major in
Business management, human resource management direction.
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