Structural Antecedents of Transformational Leadership

The current study focuses on the impact of social structures on transformational leadership to explore the social dimensions of transformational leadership process. We address two issues: (1) social antecedents of transformational leadership and (2) social networks as a conduit of information for followers in shaping their perception of the leader’s self-serving orientation and in attributing the leaders’ transformational leadership behavior to either community-serving or self-serving intention. The results from a survey of 716 employees of 96 work groups revealed that all network variables (leader’s network centrality, intragroup network density, and intragroup network centralization) are significantly related to transformational leadership behavior. Regarding the relationship between social networks and followers’ general perception of the leader’s self-serving orientation, the results showed that both intragroup network density and intragroup network centralization have positive impacts on followers’ perceived self-serving orientation of their leaders. However, leaders’ network centrality was not related to followers’ perception of their leaders. The results also showed that followers’ perceived self-serving orientation of their leaders moderate the relationship between transformational leadership behaviors and followers’ commitment to leaders. When followers perceived self-serving orientation of their leaders was high, the positive effects of transformational leadership behavior on their commitment to leaders became weaker.