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Article Excerpt
This study examines the effects of leaders' self-awareness of their own leadership on followers' satisfaction, self-leadership, and leader effectiveness. A leader's self-awareness was conceptualized as the degree of similarity between the leader's self-description and his or her followers' descriptions of leader behaviors. Transformational and empowering leadership are measured from 48 leaders and 222 of their followers. Results from confirmatory factor analyses provide support for two types of leadership: transformational and empowering. Results from polynomial regression analyses indicate that self-awareness of transformational leadership is related to leader effectiveness and followers' supervisory satisfaction. In contrast, self-awareness of empowering leadership is related to followers' self-leadership. These effects of leadership self-awareness extend beyond the direct effect of leadership on the outcome variables.
Keywords: leader effectiveness; transformational leadership; empowering leadership; polynomial regression; self-awareness; follower satisfaction; follower self-leadership; emotional intelligence
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It is wisdom to know others; It is enlightenment to know one's self.
Lao-Tzu
How well do we know ourselves? Does it matter? Is self-awareness somehow connected with our effectiveness as a leader? These are the fundamental questions that inspired the research reported in this article.
Self-awareness is related to the notion of self-evaluation. If we know our self, then our self-evaluation is likely to be more accurate. According to the literature on self-evaluation, individuals may either overrate or underrate their own performance when compared with ratings from other sources (Harris & Schaubroeck, 1988; Mabe & West, 1982). But in addition, another form of self-assessment is related to the way we view ourselves as a leader. Are we accurate in describing our own leadership? Is this accuracy related to our effectiveness as a leader? Past research on leadership has investigated discrepancies between self-descriptions of leadership and descriptions provided by others (e.g., Atwater, Roush, & Fischthal, 1995; Atwater & Yammarino, 1997; Felfe & Schyns, 2004; Thornton, 1980). These discrepancies can be interpreted as a leader's lack of self-awareness about his or her own leadership.
In the research reported here, we investigated the influence of leader self-awareness on outcomes such as leader effectiveness, follower satisfaction, and follower self-leadership. To some degree, we were inspired by the notion of emotional intelligence, which suggests that emotional self-awareness is an important part of one's life and work effectiveness (Bar-On, 2000; Gross, 1998). According to this viewpoint, if one is aware of one's own emotions, then life and work experiences are likely to be more effective and satisfying (Cote & Miners, 2006; Jordan & Ashkanasy, 2006; Sosik & Megerian, 1999). Extrapolating from this viewpoint, we suggest that self-awareness about one's own leadership is likely to produce enhanced effectiveness and satisfaction at work.
In general, research on leader self-awareness is relatively rare in the leadership literature. Interesting exceptions are the works of Atwater and Yammarino (1992); Atwater, Ostroff, Yammarino, and Fleenor (1998); Bass and Yammarino (1991); Fleenor, McCauley, and Brutus (1996), Felfe and Schyns (2004); Riggio and Cole (1992); and Sosik and Megerian (1999). Overall, this previous research found that a leader's agreement with followers (or self-awareness) about his or her own transformational leadership was associated with leader effectiveness. Yet self-awareness may be related to other outcomes, including follower affective responses and self-leadership. Atwater et al. (1998) stated, "self-other agreement is most relevant to outcomes that involve human perceptions [emphasis added] and less relevant to more objective measures such as sales volume or meeting productivity goals" (p. 595). Therefore, in this study, we extend the investigation of leader self-awareness by exploring the effect of leader self-awareness on affective and behavioral outcomes, such as satisfaction with supervisor and self-leadership, in addition to the more usual outcome of leader effectiveness.
Furthermore, we extend previous work by investigating self-awareness of empowering leadership in addition to transformational leadership. In recent decades, we have certainly seen an increasing interest among organizations to promote autonomy, especially with self-managing teams. Parallel to this interest has been the emergence of empowering leadership as a new focus of leadership. This form of leadership concentrates on the notion of a leader who enhances follower serf-leadership (e.g., Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000; Cohen, Chang, & Ledford, 1997; Manz & Sims, 1987; Salam, Cox, & Sims, 1997; Stewart & Manz, 1995). Several recent studies (Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005; Cohen et al., 1997; Ensley, Hmieleski, & Pearce, 2006; Houghton & Yoho, 2005; Manz & Sims, 1987; Pearce & Sims, 2002; Pearce, Yoo, & Alavi, 2004; Yun, Cox, & Sims, 2006; Yun, Faraj, & Sims, 2005) have recognized empowering leadership as distinct from transformational leadership.
Although empowering leadership behavior has received relatively less attention in the leadership literature when compared to transformational leadership, results have consistently found linkages to follower self-leadership and team performance. Therefore, an important part of this research is our extension of prior studies by examining leaders' self-awareness of their own empowering leadership. Our research not only compared the results of self-awareness of transformational leadership with past studies but also investigated whether the findings are similar for empowering leadership. In summary, the main contribution of this study is to extend prior research about self-awareness of one's own leadership by investigating (a) both empowering leadership and transformational leadership and (b) additional outcomes such as follower satisfaction and self-leadership.
Hypotheses
Leadership
Over the years, the literature has developed many perspectives and viewpoints of leadership. For an extensive review, we refer the reader to the encyclopedic work of Bass (1990) and the ongoing review and synthesis of the leadership literature presented by Yukl (2002, 2006). Here, we briefly review perspectives represented by the labels of transformational and empowering leadership.
Transformational leadership is defined as the process of cultivating followers' commitment to organizational objectives and shaping the culture in ways consistent with the organizational strategy (Yukl, 2002). Transformational leadership is directed toward inspiring followers to share and pursue the leader's vision (Yammarino & Bass, 1990) and motivating followers to go beyond acting in their own self-interest of exchanging effort and compliance for rewards (Hater & Bass, 1988) and to work for the good of the group (Yammarino & Bass, 1990). Transformational leadership, then, helps concentrate followers' efforts on long-term goals (Howell & Avolio, 1993). To meet these goals, transformational leaders focus on developing vision and inspiring followers' pursuit of the vision. Furthermore, they stimulate changes or alignment of systems in service of a new vision rather than working within existing systems to sustain the status quo (Howell & Avolio, 1993).
In comparison, empowering leadership involves a different set of leader behaviors that are directed more toward developing the self-influence capabilities, including: self-control, self-regulation, self-management, and self-leadership of followers (see Manz & Sims, 1987, for the first appearance of empowering leader behaviors). To achieve this goal, empowering leaders delegate extensive responsibility to followers and create an environment that enables followers to satisfy needs for growth and autonomy by exercising effective self-control and self-direction toward organizational objectives (Cohen et al., 1997; Manz & Sims, 1987, 1991, 1995; Sims & Manz, 1996; Yun et al., 2006; Yun et al., 2005). That is, they provide opportunities for their followers to make decisions and carry them out.
Empowering leadership is different from transformational leadership. In general, transformational leadership is centered largely on the vision of the leader. In contrast, empowering leadership is targeted at developing the self-leadership capabilities among followers. Indeed, Pearce et al. (2003) have empirically supported the distinction between empowering and transformational leadership behaviors. Furthermore, Arnold et al. (2000), Cohen et al. (1997), and Pearce and Sims (2002) provided support for empowering leadership as encompassing a different set of leader behaviors from those of transformational leadership. Recently, Houghton and Yoho (2005) also recognized empowering leadership as a separate type of leadership and included it in their contingency model of leadership and psychological empowerment. Following these endeavors, we conceptualize and operationalize empowering leadership as distinct from transformational leadership. Because there has been relatively little research that has directly compared empowering and transformation leadership, as a preliminary analysis, we will first empirically examine this distinction; thus, we hypothesize the following:
Hypothesis 1a: Transformational and empowering leadership are two separate constructs.
Hypothesis 1b: Controlling for empowering leadership, transformational leadership will explain additional variance only on follower ratings of leader effectiveness and follower supervisory satisfaction.
Hypothesis 1c: Controlling for transformational leadership, empowering leadership will explain additional variance on follower ratings of leader effectiveness, follower supervisory satisfaction, and follower self-leadership.
Self-Awareness and Leadership
Our main focus is on the accuracy of leaders' views of their own leadership. Considering the importance of leadership to organizations and the extent to which a leader's influence may depend on the perceptions of followers, an important question is the extent to which leaders and their followers agree in their descriptions of the leaders' behaviors.. For example, perceptual disagreement between leaders and followers may imply leaders' miscommunication or failure to respond to the demands of followers, leading to unexpected outcomes. In this research, we conceptualize leader self-awareness as the degree of similarity between leaders' descriptions of their own leadership when compared to descriptions of leadership through the eyes of their followers.
Moreover, we follow the terminology previously used in the literature (Atwater et al., 1998; Atwater & Yammarino, 1997; Fleenor et al., 1996; Sosik & Megerian, 1999) to denote various types of disagreement: underestimation, in agreement and good estimation, in agreement but poor estimation, and overestimation. Leaders whose self-ratings are below followers' ratings are referred to as underestimators. Leaders whose self-ratings are high and similar to the followers' rating are referred to as in-agreement-good estimators. Leaders whose self-ratings are low and similar to their followers'...
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