Sustainability And Business - Research Paper Example

The article to be discussed is a 2010 study by B. E. Wright and S. K. Pandey entitled Transformational Leadership in the Public Sector: Does Structure Matter and has an “Organizational Communication” classification. Article Critique: Transformational Leadership in the Public Sector: Does Structure Matter? By Bradley E. Wright and Sanjay K Pandey Introduction The study by Wright and Pandey was intended to determine why there was a discrepancy between theoretical models on mainstream leadership which showed that transformational leaders are “expected to be both less common and less effective in public sector organizations” (p. 75) than in the private sector because of strong “bureaucratic control mechanisms” which apparently leave the public sector without a need for strong leadership.

Wright and Pandey noted that this theory has not been supported by meta analyses which had found that “transformational leadership is as common and effective in public organizations” (2010, p. 75). The authors had considered a number of reasons why there would be a difference between theory and the empirical work on the topic. One of those reasons for example was that perhaps government organizations themselves were not as bureaucratic as theorists presumed although Wright and Pandey (2010) were not convinced on this idea.

They decided to test the organizational and contextual influences on the emergence and effectiveness of transformational leadership. The study itself was to test how the culture of the public sector organizations might “hinder the emergence of transformational leadership” (Wright & Pandey, 2010, p.76). The background to the hypothesis The author’s provided an extensive literature review that covered concepts such as what transformational leadership was; the attributes transformational leaders would have and how the behavior of these leaders impacted employee performance and satisfaction, in government agencies and non-profits.

The second part of the review was written to support the author’s idea that there were not a lot of studies that considered organizational structure and its impact on leadership. This led them to test their hypothesis that: “The more hierarchical an organization's authority structure, the lower the reported practice of transformational leadership behaviors. [H.sub.2] The weaker the lateral/upward communication in an organization, the lower the reported practice of transformational leadership behaviors. [H.sub.

3a,b] The greater organizational formalization (measured as [3a] procurement red tape and [3b] human resource red tape), the lower the reported practice of transformational leadership behaviors” [H.sub.4] The more an organization's structure impedes the establishment of extrinsic reward-performance contingencies (here measured as human resource red tape), the higher the reported practice of transformational leadership behaviors. [H.sub.5] The use of organizational performance measures will decrease the reported transformational leadership behaviors” (Wright & Pandey, 2010, p.79). The Method The data was collected as part of the Phase 4 of the national Administrative Studies Project (NASP-IV) and comprised of a survey given to senior managers who had local government jurisdictions with populations over 50,000.

This included general managers, as well as functional managers in a variety of departments including Finance, Public Works and Economic Development. International City/County Management Association (ICMA) compiled a list according to study criteria set by the authors. Then because email addresses could not be supplied because of