Exploring the relationships between leader characteristics, team culture and the inner dynamics of transformational leadership

Abstract

Global expenditure on leadership development interventions is estimated to exceed three hundred billion US dollars per annum, yet despite these significant budgets, leadership development interventions have achieved inconsistent results. Leadership research therefore remains critical to understanding and influencing leadership development. Transformational leadership theory dominates contemporary leadership research and this study therefore focused on explaining the inner dynamics of transformational leadership as demonstrated by the interrelationships between, and amongst, the concepts of a leader’s character, integrity, stage of adult development and team culture. Data were gathered from 31 senior management team leaders, 180 members of these senior management teams, and 1080 additional raters through a combination of online, self-report and multi-rater feedback assessments. The empirical analysis revealed that the null model of no interrelationships between the concepts of a leader’s character, integrity, stage of adult development, and team culture failed in several aspects. An alternative model was therefore formulated, and meaning was assigned to the interrelationships between these concepts in a manner that revealed the inner dynamics of transformational leadership as it is described in the domain of leader and team interactions. The findings of the study were based on the consequences of seven assumptions formulated from the alternative model. These assumptions stated that the interactions between a leader, the people they lead and the social systems they encounter constitutes an interaction space that contains the inner dynamics of transformational leadership; that the inner dynamics of transformational leadership, as explained by leader character, leader integrity and team culture, are not deterministic; that leader integrity is an important factor in both leader character and team culture; that leader maturity is not a factor in the inner dynamics of transformational leadership; that team culture behaviour is more prominent than leader character behaviour in the inner dynamics of transformational leadership; that other-focused behaviour is more prominent in transformational leadership than self-focused behaviour, and that a relational inner dynamic of transformational leadership manifests in the network of leader and team selffocused and other-focused behaviour relationships. The consequences of these assumptions provided deeper understanding and insight into the inner dynamics of transformational leadership.