A Review of Research Evidence on the Antecedents of Transformational Leadership

Jingping Sun,Xuejun Chen,Sijia Zhang

doi:10.3390/educsci7010015

Jingping Sun, Xuejun Chen + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci7010015

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Abstract

As the most-studied form of leadership across disciplines in both Western and Chinese contexts, transformational school leadership has the potential to suit diverse national and cultural contexts. Given the growing evidence showing the positive effects of transformational leadership on various school outcomes as it relates to school environment, teacher and student achievement, we wanted to explore the factors that gave rise to transformational leadership. The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the antecedents fostering transformational leadership in the contexts of both the United States and China. This paper reviews and discusses the empirical studies of the last two decades, concentrating on the variables that are antecedent to transformational leadership mainly in the educational context, but also in public management, business and psychology. Results show that transformational leadership is related to three sets of antecedents, which include: (1) the leader’s qualities (e.g., self-efficacy, values, traits, emotional intelligence); (2) organizational features (e.g., organization fairness); and (3) the leader’s colleagues’ characteristics (e.g., follower’s initial developmental level). Some antecedents were common to both contexts, while other antecedents appeared to be national context specific. The implications of the findings for future research and leader preparation in different national contexts are discussed.

Highlights

The Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) as the measurement tool for Transformational leadership (TL) was used in one study, which was developed by Kouzes and Posner [54]
Transformational leadership practices and their positive effects on leadership effectiveness and various school outcomes have been documented, much less is known about what gives rise to TL behaviors
This review identified the key practices conceptualized in TL in both contexts and three categories of its antecedents

Summary

Introduction

To create an environment that will foster and encourage innovation and trust, a leader needs to involve educators, stakeholders and even students to be a part of the change process All of these are the strengths of transformational school leadership. As part of the school restructuring and improvement movements in the late 1990s, scholars have developed several leadership models in their efforts to identify “effective leadership” to improve student learning outcomes. This includes, for example, instructional [1,2], transformational [3], participative [4], managerial [5] and, more recently, distributed leadership [6] and inclusive leadership [7]. A search of keywords in resources published from 1990 to 2003 in the PsycINFO

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