The importance of a homogeneous transformational leadership climate for organizational performance

This study puts a core assumption of the recently-emerged concept of transformational leadership (TFL) climate under direct empirical scrutiny; namely, that it is not only the average level (i.e., the mean perceptions among employees), but also the level of homogeneity (i.e., the variance in perceptions) which is important for understanding the effect of TFL climate on organizational outcomes. By developing and testing an interaction hypothesis in a dual-source dataset containing 107 small- and medium-sized organizations, we extend previous knowledge in two important ways. First, we extend the limited
empirical evidence on TFL climate by relating it for the first time to organizational performance. Second, we test the previously assumed, but never investigated, assumption of homogeneity for the TFL climate construct at the organizational level. Our results show that it is important to investigate such underlying core assumptions, as the average level of TFL climate was found to relate more strongly to organizational performance with increasing levels of homogeneity in TFL climate.