A511.5.3.RB - Remote Transformational Leadership

A511.5.3.RB - Remote Transformational Leadership

The article “Remote Transformational Leadership” talks about how organizations traditionally have face to face contact when applying transformational leadership, however wanted to conduct a study if leadership styles such as transformational, laissez-faire, and management-by-exception both through an electronic technological means (Email) and laboratory means could actually be identified by the test subjects who were part of the study and see if they can pin point exactly what type of leadership style was being presented through the experiments (Kelloway, E. K., Barling, J., Kelley, E., Comtois, J., & Gatien, B.2003). In today’s world email is the new form of communication as well as teleconferences, Skype, Facetime, and other sources of technological advances that face to face contact is near irrelevant with businesses and organizations expand and are in multiple locations when trying to move an organization and their subordinates in the views of the leader.

  

The authors’ hypotheses were described in the two different studies, the first being “that individuals exposed to e-mail 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 e-mail instructions that did not contain these aspects of transformational leadership”,  however lacking the realm of no significance of intellectual stimulation or charisma from the leader  (Kelloway, E. K., Barling, J., Kelley, E., Comtois, J., & Gatien, B.2003). Whereas the second hypothesized and found problem-solving performance tasks would be more suitable when groups were given an e-mail from a remote leader that pertains specifically on intellectual stimulation or charismatic leadership traits.

The type of research they used was a Quantitative approach with using surveys, mathematical equations, graphs and tables to their empirical research. They took over 200 students and use them to gather the data needed.  The results from the first study although through the vignette approach was not efficient enough the overall assessment was minimal in effectiveness, and in an addition to a charismatic leadership message on individual motivation needing further research. The overall assessment however “findings suggest that electronically mediated communication channels may be used to convey the same leadership "message" as in face-to-face interaction, which questions the suggestion that leader-follower distance has a negative effect on performance and followers' perceptions of their leader”  (Kelloway, E. K., Barling, J., Kelley, E., Comtois, J., & Gatien, B.2003) which means that remote leadership can still have the same effects compared to those who have face-to-face interactions which is more positive than most.

The value of this research was to have awareness of the forever changing world we are experiencing today. With leadership and management spaced out for example, a headquarters for an organization might be based out of Seattle, Washington and the production ware house may be based out of Texas. In the Army we experience that and a smaller scale. When I was deployed my platoon was separated from my company and my commander still had maintain command and control of us through video teleconference, emails, and radio transmission. He gave me the encouragement and guidance needed to conduct the day to day missions as well with me giving him situational reports of how my guys were doing. In addition to coordinating logistics, personnel, and operation issues by providing individualized consideration (Yukl, 2013).

References:

Kelloway, E. K., Barling, J., Kelley, E., Comtois, J., & Gatien, B. (2003). Remote transformational leadership. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 24(3), 163. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/226926653?accountid=27203

Yukl, G. (2012). Leadership in organizations (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 13: 978-0132771863.