Transformational Leadership Contributions for Employee Autonomy

1. Introduction

Transformational Leadership is the center of multiple investigations, for its relevance in companies and all types of associations, for attempting to match the needs of followers to the goals and objectives of the leaders (Bass et al., 1987). Research tell us that transformational leadership allows companies to create employees more motivated, more aligned with the company, in line with the strategies that benefits the company and impacts the employee’s ability of being autonomous, in their work (Galli, 2019; Anjum, Ming & Puig, 2019).

The professional implications of using a Transformational Leadership approaches could result in more capable and autonomous employees resulting in greater results. The social implications also reflect a higher importance, regarding the ongoing developing capabilities of the employees who want to gain more responsibilities and achieve superior positions within the company.

According to Hardré and Reeve (2009:167), “little attention to date has been given to actual interventions to promote autonomy-supportive style of managers, using the framework of self-determination theory”, which indicates that leaders aren’t aware of the advantages that having a transformational approach can have on the outcome of their employees. Losing opportunities to increase efficiency, cost savings and reducing unproductive work time, a cause for distraction ate the workplace.

The goal of this study is to understand how Transformational leadership reveals the importance of having a autonomy supportive style of management and assuming the autonomy of workers, the objective is to understand how that relates to the increase of efficiency in the processes of the company, which means cost savings, reducing unproductive work time and, overall, an increased productivity.

The research conducted in this study shows that is important for leaders to understand the advantages of having a transformational approach, since it has a direct positive effect in employee autonomy and in the increase of efficiency. The research also indicates the importance of indirect effects and the mediator effect of efficiency and employee autonomy, revealing that cost savings and unproductive work time can be achieved by assuring the increasing of efficiency and employee autonomy in processes and instill it in employees.

The main purpose of this investigation is to identify the impact of Transformational Leadership in the four dependent variables. To complete this article, the following objectives must be met: (i) Understand how Transformational Leadership impacts Employee Autonomy; (ii) Understand how Transformational Leadership impacts Efficiency; (iii) Understand how Transformational Leadership impacts Cost Savings; (iv) Understand how Transformational Leadership impacts Unproductive Work Time.

The article is structured as follows. The next section presents the main concepts and section 3 formulates the research hypothesis. Section 4 details the methodological approach and data collection procedures. Section 5 presents the study results, which are discussed in section 6. Finally section 7 details the conclusions, managerial implication, limitations and future research.