Linking transformational leadership and organizational culture

Abstract

Many authors assume a strong relationship between culture and leadership in organizations. Leaders create, transform and manage organizational cultures. Although this linkage between organizational culture and leadership is often referred to, hypotheses and propositions are often not specific and insufficient evidence has been gathered concerning the relationship between these variables. In this paper, the transformational - transactional leadership paradigm is linked to organizational culture. To show how research into this relationship could be conducted, the transactional - transformational leadership paradigm is combined with a measurement-oriented perspective on organizational culture in order to derive and test hypotheses. Transformational and transactional leadership are linked to the culture model used by the Focus research group, which is based on the competing values model. The paper is concluded by discussing several issues in leadership and organizational culture that need further investigation.