The relationship between leadership practices and organizational effectiveness outcomes: A public transit agency study

Considering the volatile nature of the environment in which public transit agencies in the United States operate today, it is appropriate that leadership practices focus on transformational and transactional values. If public transit agencies are to fulfill their mission of providing safe, efficient, and economical transit services and products to the public, they must part with the traditional ways of doing business. The purpose of this study was to explore, evaluate, and understand the relationship between leadership practices and their organizational effectiveness outcomes in a public transit agency. Gaining such understanding led to the recommendation of some practical solutions for performance improvement. The study used the MLQ 5X-Short (Rater Form) survey instrument developed by Bass and Avolio (1995, 2000) to collect data from participants in the referent organization. A researcher developed questionnaire was also used to collect some demographic data. Descriptive statistical technique was used to gain an initial understanding of the data collected. Scatter plots were used to present the relationship between the leadership constructs and their organizational outcomes. This provided a visual understanding of the relationships and identified the existence of outliers in the two sets of variables. The graphs indicated that transformational and transactional leadership practices are positively related with the outcome variables. However, laissez-faire leadership behavior appeared to be negatively correlated with the outcome variables. Nonparametric statistical technique was utilized to test the hypotheses.