An Investigation of the Perception of Transformational Leadership Effectiveness in Predicting Job Commitment and Satisfactio

This dissertation is an investigation of how well employees' perception of four factors of transformational leadership effectiveness predicts employee commitment and employee job satisfaction. Practitioners can use this information to craft strategies to enhance leaders' effectiveness and employees' perceptions of leaders' effectiveness to increase overall organizational effectiveness and potential success. Missing in the literature is a quantitative understanding of the extent certain factors of transformational leadership affect employees' perception of supervisor leadership effectiveness, which in turn predicts employee commitment, and employee job satisfaction; this dissertation attempts to fill in that gap. The research question that guides this study is: "To what extent does transformational leadership theory explain the relationships between employees' perceptions of four factors of transformational leadership effectiveness, employee commitment, and employee job satisfaction?" The data collected from the study was accessed by downloading the free-for-use secondary data set from the General Social Survey (Smith, Marsden, Hout, & Kim, 2013). The population of interest for this study was adult (18+) employees in the U.S. This population was further restricted to those able to respond to the survey in English or Spanish. For the research question, a standard multiple regression analysis was used to investigate if there is a statistically significant relationship between the predictors and the outcome variables. In testing some of the factors of transformational leadership on organizational outcomes, this study found that employees' perceptions of transformational leadership effectiveness significantly predicted employee commitment and employee job satisfaction.