Transformational Leadership and Follower's Organizational Commitment: Role of Leader's Gender

This experimental study investigated the impact of the leader's gender (femininity and masculinity) on transformational leadership and the follower's organizational commitment (affective, continuance, and normative) using a sample of 84 managers of a manufacturing company in eastern India. Participants were randomly assigned to the conditions of a 2 (femininity: yes or no) x 2 (masculinity: yes or no) experimental design. Transformational leadership was measured through the five factors: idealized influence attributed; idealized influence behaviour; inspirational motivation; intellectual stimulation; individualized consideration. Results show that masculinity enhances normative commitment and androgyny enhances continuance commitment. The findings of our study also show that the positive effect of masculinity on normative commitment continues to exist even after controlling for the common variance between normative commitment and inspirational motivation. Contrary to our expectations, the findings show that femininity reduces inspirational motivation dimension of transformational leadership. Further, the findings of our study show that transformational leadership enhances continuance commitment only when the leader is androgynous and that transformational leadership enhances affective commitment only for the masculine leader. The managerial and organizational implications of the findings are discussed in this paper.