Transformational leadership and performance across criteria and levels: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of research

Abstract

Although transformational leadership has been studied extensively, the magnitude of the relationship between transformational leadership and follower performance across criterion types and levels of analysis remains unclear. Based on 117 independent samples over 113 primary studies, the current meta-analytic study showed that transformational leadership was positively related to individual-level follower performance across criterion types, with a stronger relationship for contextual performance than for task performance across most study settings. In addition, transformational leadership was positively related to performance at the team and organization levels. Moreover, both meta-analytic regression and relative importance analyses consistently showed that transformational leadership had an augmentation effect over transactional leadership (contingent reward) in predicting individual-level contextual performance and team-level performance. Contrary to our expectation, however, no augmentation effect of transformational leadership over contingent reward was found in predicting individual-level task performance. Instead, contingent reward explained incremental variance in individual-level task performance beyond that explained by transformational leadership. © The Author(s) 2011.