Mediating and Moderating Effects of Union Commitment and Union Politicization on Transactional and Transformational Leadership Effectiveness: Development of a Conceptual Model

Abstract

Leadership effectiveness has been the central theme in most of leadership research from the beginning of leadership studies in early years of the 20th century. Thousand of studies have been conducted examining the components of leadership, emergence of leader and the factors for leadership effectiveness. Behaviour of the leader stands prominent as a determinant of leadership effectiveness in organizations. The extensive research on transactional and transformational leadership has accumulated a vast body of knowledge explaining leadership effectiveness. However, leadership and transactional and transformational leadership in particular have not been explored adequately in deferent contexts for its contextual validity. Comparatively very few studies have been carried out on transformational and transactional leadership in unionized work contexts. Researchers have explored the specific variables associated with employees?behaviour in unionized work environment. Among these unionization variables, union commitment is found to be associated with employees outcomes , namely job satisfaction, commitment and performance and political belief of employees has been cited as a possible moderator on perceived management performance. This conceptual paper aims at proposing a conceptual model for empirical examination of the effect of union commitment and union unionization implications on leadership effectiveness. It attributes a mediating effect for union commitment and moderating effect for union politicization by reviewing the relevant literature. This paper makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge with the proposed conceptual framework so that it can be used as a basis for the future research in this context.