In leadership theory, transactional leadership and transformational leadership represent two complementary points of view. Transactional leadership focuses on the task-related exchange of actions and rewards between follower and leader. Conversely, transformational leadership emphasizes a person-orientation by aligning followers' needs with the organization's (higher) tasks and goals (Bass, 1990). Although several leadership approaches can generally be classified as either transactional or transformational, there are some that more explicitly deal with the decision of whether to focus on the tasks to be pursued or on the people to realize these tasks (Lussier and Achua, 2009). Most of the approaches share an underlying assumption that relatively stable leader–follower constellations are prevalent in permanent organizational structures. This is reflected by the notion of the “emergence” of leadership (Atwater et al., 1999), and the discussion of different temporal sequences in leadership research (Bluedorn and Jaussi, 2008). Both imply a common history and future, as is the case in permanent organizations (Janowicz-Panjaitan et al., 2009). In contrast, a temporary exchange relationship does not include continuity of social relations, which serves as the basis for leader–follower relationships.
The use of temporary forms of organizing is increasing as organizations face growing uncertainties in dynamic environments (Hitt et al., 2007). Owing to these uncertainties, firms often choose flexible organizational structures. Organizational flexibility (Whittington et al., 1999) is realized by temporary organizations in the form of projects and programs (Ekstedt et al., 1999). The literature has identified several characteristics which distinguish temporary organizations from permanent organizations: limited duration, unique outcome, missing/blurred hierarchies, higher uncertainty/risks, and heterogeneous work teams (Bakker, 2010, Brockhoff, 2006, Maaninen-Olsson and Müllern, 2009 and Pich et al., 2002). In general, these characteristics pertain to all manifestations of temporary organizations, such as programs and projects, but in a particular case each of the characteristics can be more or less pronounced (Janowicz-Panjaitan et al., 2009).
Effective leadership plays an important role in ensuring the success of temporary organizations facing a high degree of uncertainty (Waldman et al., 2001). The important role of leadership and the specific characteristics of projects correspond to an increase in studies focusing on leadership in a project context. Whereas earlier studies mainly searched for factors that define successful project leaders (Zimmerer and Yasin, 1998), more recent research draws on more advanced leadership theories such as transformational leadership (Barber and Warn, 2005, Clarke, 2010, Keegan and Den Hartog, 2004, Strang, 2005 and Strang, 2011) to study leadership in projects. With only few exceptions (Müller and Turner, 2007), existing studies focused on single project types (Keller, 2006 and Strang, 2011) or industries/companies (Keegan and Den Hartog, 2004) and did not explicitly consider the effects of temporary organizations' characteristics and their varying degrees on leadership.
We assume that leadership behavior in temporary organizations causes effects different from those in permanent organizations and that existing leadership theory requires an extension. The aim of this article is therefore to extend transactional and transformational leadership theory by including the characteristics of temporary organizations. For this purpose, we develop a research model comprising propositions on the effects of the temporary organizations' characteristics on leadership and on its effectiveness. We focus on the project as the unit of analysis and consider transformational and transactional leadership behaviors of the project manager/leader. As transformational leadership is reported to have a particular positive effect on followers' commitment (Avolio et al., 2004) and commitment is supposed to form a link between leadership behavior and organizational performance (Steyrer et al., 2008), our model also includes propositions on leadership's effects on employees' commitment in projects.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we discuss the temporary organizations' characteristics before we elaborate on the implications of these characteristics for leadership. This is followed by Section 4 where we introduce transactional and transformational leadership and develop our research model. In Section 5, we discuss the contribution of our model in light of existing research on leadership in projects and we portray avenues for future research. The sixth section concludes the paper.
The characteristics of temporary organizations seem indeed to impact leadership effectiveness in projects. We have made first attempts to extend leadership research in this direction. In this context, we have identified several challenges which leadership research and practice should consider when dealing with temporary organizations. In general, environmental uncertainty as an underlying rationale for the use of temporary organizations should be scrutinized in terms of its effects on leadership in projects. In particular, the transferability of predictions made by research on leadership in permanent organizations depends on the individual extent and ratio of project characteristics.
