Examining Leader–Follower Congruence of Social Responsibility Values in Transformational Leadership

Abstract

Recent reviews of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research indicate a need for studies of micro-level influence processes addressing CSR values. Transformational leadership is a values-laden influence process whereby leaders elicit superior follower performance through the alignment of work values. Using data from 129 leaders and 582 of their direct reports, this study’s results demonstrated that leader CSR values were associated with transformational leadership. Transformational leadership was positively associated with follower stakeholder CSR values and negatively related to follower shareholder CSR values. Leader stakeholder CSR values moderated the relationship between transformational leadership and follower stakeholder values, offering evidence of leader–follower value congruence while addressing a limitation of prior studies that adopted perceptual measures of values congruence. Implications for transformational leadership theory, practice, and future research are discussed.