| Like many U.S. sports organizations in the 1990s, the recreational sports/fitness industry in Taiwan currently pays much attention to transformational leadership and organizational culture. This is because these topics are believed to contain the key to understanding organizational effectiveness. In fact, this area still remains a topic of theoretical discussion in Taiwan sports research circles. So far there have been no empirical studies that attempt to combine these causal relationships into a comprehensive model and to test its effects in the Taiwanese recreational sports/fitness industry. The purpose of this study was to establish a comprehensive causal model for transformational leadership, organizational culture, and organizational effectiveness and to test it with empirical data.; The author found in this study, that transactional and transformational leadership are identical, so they were identified together simply as leadership. The construct of leadership was found to have eight observed variables: idealized attributes, idealized behavior, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, contingent rewards, active management by exception, and passive management by exception. All of these variables were found to validly represent leadership and leadership was found to be valid and reliable construct. The measurement model for leadership was found to be a good fit. Organizational culture had four observed variables: managing change, achieving goals, coordinating teamwork, and customer orientation. They were found to validly represent organizational culture, which was found to be a valid and reliable construct. The measurement model for this latent variable was found to be a good fit. There were originally four observed variables associated with organizational effectiveness: organization, decision-making, personnel relationships, and job satisfaction. However, decision-making was found to be invalid, so only three of the variables were used in this study. These three were found to validly represent organizational effectiveness, which was then found to be a valid and reliable construct. This measurement model was originally found not to be valid, however with the removal of decision-making, it was found to be valid and a good fit.; Structural equation modeling was used to test this research model because it is believed to be the most powerful statistical method for testing causal relationships among observed and latent variables. The results indicated that transactional/transformational leadership can have a direct significant impact on organizational culture and organizational effectiveness, and that organizational culture can have a direct significant impact on organizational effectiveness. Therefore, transactional/transformational leadership can influence organizational effectiveness indirectly via organizational culture. From the values regarding impact, the research found that transactional/transformational leadership has a direct impact (a standardized coefficient value of 0.09) on organizational effectiveness. But it has an indirect impact (a standardized coefficient value of 0.19) on organizational effectiveness. This means that the indirect impact is more important than the direct impact for transactional/transformational leadership on organizational effectiveness. This indicates that establishing a good organizational culture may be more important than focusing only on organizational effectiveness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
