| Considerable research has been conducted to increase the knowledge base of employee voice within organizations. Given the high stakes of competing in the current economic climate, it is imperative that leaders create an organizational atmosphere that is an incubator for employees to bring forth opportunistic ideas and suggestion for process improvement. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the four elements associated with transformational leadership proposed by Bass (1985) specifically: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration and to measure their level of correlation with employee voice. In order to conduct meaningful research, the psychometric properties of the voice scale used in the survey instrument for this study had to be improved over what had been previously done. The research instrument created for this study has succeeded in moving the bar higher for reliability and ultimately for a more valid voice scale. Incorporating items in order to measure the level of change behavior evident within the department made a substantial improvement in the reliability alpha (.944) in the voice construct. This quantitative cross sectional study based on five U.S. ophthalmology practices (N = 137) used the newly constructed voice scale as the dependent variable and correlated the independent transformational leadership variable to this scale. The results showed that each transformational leadership scale was highly correlated to the voice scale and significant. In addition, a multiple regression was performed and the model showed excellent prediction values with almost 72% of the variance explained (R square = .715). The individual consideration scale registered the greatest impact in the regression model. |
