The relation between Leadership and Outcome Variables. Follower personality as a moderator.
Summary
The main purpose of this study was to explore the moderating effect of personality on the relation between leadership and outcome variables. Additionally the incremental validity of leadership styles was examined. To explore these issues, 291 employees and managers of an Indian Unit of a large European financial services company completed a questionnaire. The results show that inspirational leadership had a low/ moderate incremental validity over and above consideration in predicting burnout. Consultative leadership was excluded from analysis because of low reliability. The interaction of inspirational leadership with extroversion was significant for job satisfaction, burnout, exhaustion and effectiveness (as rated by the follower). When inspirational leadership is high, introverts experienced less burnout and exhaustion and more effectiveness than introverts. Extroverts experience more job satisfaction than introverts, when inspirational leadership was high. Additionally, the higher follower’s neuroticism, the stronger the interaction between consideration and initiating structure, in predicting job satisfaction and exhaustion. The results also show that followers high on neuroticism experience the least job satisfaction, when a leader was low on both consideration and initiating structure and the most job satisfaction, when a leader was high on consideration, as well as high on initiating structure. However, the latter was not significant.