Communicating the Vision: How Face‐to‐Face Dialogue Facilitates Transformational Leadership

Abstract

For public managers facing political and structural constraints, transformational leadership promises to meaningfully improve outcomes by communicating an inspiring vision of the organization. But this promise rests to a great degree on the communication skills and behaviors of the leader. A better understanding of how transformational leadership functions in organizations therefore requires a deeper application of theory from the field of communications. This article explores the question of what communication behaviors facilitate transformational leadership. A media richness framework is applied to propose that transformational leaders will be most effective when employing a face‐to‐face dialogue approach to communication. Using a multisource longitudinal research design, the authors find support for this proposition in an empirical test of 256 Danish tax units, lower and upper secondary schools, child care centers, and bank branches. The findings also show that size matters, with diminishing effectiveness of face‐to‐face dialogue in larger organizations.

Paradoxical leadership in public sector organisations: Its role in fostering employee resilience

“…Articulating a compelling vision can be effective for public organisations facing political and structural constraints, particularly when tied with good communications. But the effectiveness of both a compelling vision, and communication skills, is diminished in large organisations (Jensen, Moynihan, & Salomonsen, ). Transactional leadership omits the importance of service to others, or public service motivation, a feature of many PA studies.…”

Linking transformational leadership and value congruence among Chinese police force: The mediating role of goal clarity and the moderating role of public service motivation

“…Finally, we measured transformational leadership as a unitary concept using the traditional four‐dimension approach, which is a common practice in public administration (Avolio, Bass, & Jung, ; Caillier, ; Wright et al., ). However, given the fact that some recent studies in public administration are using single dimension such as visioning to measure transformational leadership (Jensen & Bro, ; Jensen et al., ), future studies should see whether our results hold using other measurement of transformational leadership. Also, although we consider using an indigenous measure of transformational leadership as a strength of our study, future studies should validate our results in other cultures using other measures.…”

“…Another important subject to investigate is how transformational leaders can lead to goal clarity. Recent developments argue that transformational leaders utilise rich communication channels such as face‐to‐face conversations to transmit information (Jensen et al., ), while others emphasise the importance of culture (Sun & Henderson, ; Sun & Wang, ) and job design (Andersen & Bøllingtoft, ; Jensen, ). Future studies are needed to tackle how transformational leaders set up clear goals to followers.…”

“…Transformational leaders should be able to “create an alignment between employee values and the organization's ideology by…setting clear and significant goals” (Paarlberg & Lavigna, , p. 711). First, transformational leaders can communicate a clear mission to their followers to motivate them to go beyond immediate self‐interests (Caillier, ; Jensen et al., ; Wright et al., ). Clear mission helps the followers to see the important prosocial impact of their daily work activities (Caillier, ; Jensen, ).…”

“…They set up internal communication channels (Pandey & Rainey, ), encourage followers to ask questions, and are open to suggestions. Two‐way communication is possible under the supervision of transformational leaders (Jensen et al., ). In this way, when the followers face goal ambiguity, they would approach their leaders for guidance, help, and discussion.…”