A511.5.3.RB – Remote Transformational Leadership

February 13, 2016

Richard Martinez

MSLD 511

            In the past most of the studies on transformational leadership has been centered on the face-to-face leadership. This where the leader is always present with the followers. In this new day and age of advancement leaders are now being tasked more and more with leading followers in remote location where the leader cannot be present with the followers. New technologies like email, phone conferencing, and video conferencing have allowed the leader to lead their teams from remote locations. The focus of this scholarly paper is remote leadership. Leadership interactions that are characterized by electronically-mediated communication between geographically and physically isolated leaders and followers are what the term “remote leadership” means (Kelloway, et al, 2002). This is also being conducted in two studies

             In the first study the hypotheses is first, can recipients perceive and accurately identify leadership styles communicated by email. Second, is receiving an email with a positive leadership message as opposed to a negative message perceived to be associated with positive outcomes? The researchers suggest that both laissez-faire and management-by-exception styles may be especially relevant to remote leadership environment. In the second study the researchers hypothesized that individuals exposed to email messages containing a charismatic or intellectually stimulating message would express higher levels of task motivation, and demonstrate higher levels of performance on a laboratory task than individuals who received email instructions that did not contain these aspects of transformational leadership (Kelloway, et al, 2002).

            For study 1 to answer the two questions being examined in the hypotheses the vignette approach is used. They had to develop three vignettes that reflect an email representing transformational leadership, management-by-exception, and laissez-faire. This study used 132 undergraduate students from one Canadian university voluntary and anonymously participated in the main experiment. No prior classes in organizational behavior were given to the students prior to the study. The procedure consisted of the students reading the hypothetical situation containing the email from Jeff, and Mark’s reply before completing the questionnaires containing scales. It was administered in class and distributed so no student sitting next to each other had the same vignettes. 42 read the management-by-exception, 43 read the laissez-faire, and 45 read the transformational leadership vignette. In the second study the experiment involved using a group problem solving exercise similar to the well-known NASA exercise. This required the participants to read a short scenario describing a survival situation. Their task is to rank in order a list of supplies in terms of importance with 1 being the most important and 12 the least important. Each participant completed this task separately. After completing they were then given a copy of the email containing either a charismatic, intellectually stimulating, or a transformational message. The participants completed the survival task individually then as part of a group. They were assigned to a group according to which message they received. Finally they needed to complete a brief post-task questionnaire.

            The results in study 1 did demonstrate that individuals did distinguish between different leadership styles within emails. They were also consistent with the researcher anticipations that emails encompassing transformational leadership messages were associated with greater interpersonal justice and satisfaction compared to messages based on the management-by-exception or laissez-faire styles. In the subsequent study the results illustrate that in the manipulation check the participants correctly identified the projected characteristics of the remote leader. The results also confirmed what they hypothesized about performance on a problem solving task would be better when groups were presented with an email from a remote leader that contained specific intellectual stimulating or charismatic leadership characteristics. However the results did not support an effect of a charismatic leadership message on an individual motivation and further research in this area is needed.

            This research does have great value in fully understanding the differences between remote leadership and face to face leadership. The findings suggested that remote transformational leadership can still have the same encouraging effects as face to face interaction. The study also shows that emails can express the same leadership message as in face to face communication does. This questions the suggestion that leader-follower distance creates a negative effect on performance and followers perspective on their leaders. Next is to replicate these findings in the field setting and they show considerable promise for the effectiveness of remote transformational leadership (Kelloway, et al, 2002).