Abstract
Leaders functioning in an informative, knowledgeable and fast changing world are required to guide their teams to perform through organizational volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Teams built within an environment of knowledge, innovation, motivation, and empowerment are more likely to achieve sustainable successful performance. To this end, transformational leadership plays an essential role influencing team members’ values, attitudes, skills, and knowledge as they strive toward realization of their organization's shared goals and objectives.In responding to multiple research calls in the domains of transformational leadership, transactive memory system (TMS) and women leadership, this thesis focuses on evaluating the relationship among transformational leadership, TMS and team performance, while investigating team leader gender as a moderating factor that influences the strength of relations. Based on the research objective and research questions, I crafted a comprehensive conceptual framework with hypotheses fully covering the associations and effects of these constructs, which are mainly built upon the accumulative literature review of previous leadership, TMS and women leadership research.
In this study, I developed and empirically verified the arguments by means of a multisource three-phase research design (i.e., team leader and team member). A three-wave multi-informant survey was conducted with an over-90% response rate, yielding valid data from 97 teams with 524 team members. In the first round survey, all team members rated their respective team leader on the four I’s of transformational leadership behaviours, namely idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration. Two months later in the second wave survey, all team members rated their respective team on TMS. Two weeks thereafter in the third wave survey, all team leaders were invited to evaluate their respective team performance.
By employing moderated mediation analysis, I discovered that the four I’s of transformational leadership are positively related to TMS individually and TMS has a positive effect on team performance. Thus, TMS shows the mediating effect of transformational leadership and team performance. Furthermore, the research analysis revealed that leader gender moderates the indirect effect of intellectual stimulation and individual consideration on team performance via TMS. Specifically, female leaders with intellectual stimulation and individual consideration make stronger indirect effects on team performance via TMS than their male counterparts.
This thesis contributes to theoretical development of transformational leadership, TMS and women leadership literature, while also providing specific managerial implications for multiple stakeholders in leader selection, leadership development, talent retention and women leader pipeline building in organizations.
| Date of Award | 3 Sept 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Muammer OZER (Supervisor) |