The relationship between employees’self-monitoring and occupational self-efficacy and transformational leadership

Abstract

The topic of the present study is the relationship between transformational leadership as perceived by followers and follower characteristics such as self-monitoring and self-efficacy. Self-monitoring was hypothesized to be positively related to transformational leadership, as persons with high self-monitoring are a) sensitive to expressive behaviors of others and b) able to control their own expressive behavior. The correlations found here, however, are too small to confirm this assumption. With respect to self-efficacy, past research leads to two contradictory assumptions concerning its relationship to transformational leadership: a) Self-efficacy is negatively related to a perception of transformational leadership as "weak" employees (i.e. persons with low self-efficacy) are especially susceptible to transformational leadership or b) Self-efficacy is positively related to a perception of transformational leadership as employees with high self-efficacy see themselves as being similar to their leaders and thus tend to perceived transformational leadership in their leaders. Whereas the first hypothesis had to be rejected, the second was supported. The sample was then subdivided into groups in order to test extreme group differences. No extreme group differences could be found.