تاثیر رهبری تحول گرا بر عملکرد سازمانی از طریق نوآوری و یادگیری سازمانی

This study analyzes the influences of transformational leadership on organizational performance through the dynamic capabilities of organizational learning and innovation. Although these indirect interrelations are very important for improving organizational performance, previous research has not usually explored them. The study confirms these influences empirically, basing the analysis on a sample of 168 Spanish firms. The results reveal that (1) transformational leadership influences organizational performance positively through organizational learning and innovation; (2) organizational learning influences organizational performance positively, both directly and indirectly through organizational innovation; (3) organizational innovation influences organizational performance positively.

Transformational leadership can be defined as the style of leadership that heightens consciousness of collective interest among the organization's members and helps them to achieve their collective goals. In contrast, transactional leadership focuses on promoting the individual interests of the leaders and their followers and attaining the satisfaction of contractual obligations on the part of both by establishing objectives and monitoring and controlling the results (Bass and Avolio, 2000). Leaders use transactional and transformational behavior to different degrees (Bass, 1999). This investigation focuses on transformational leadership. Theories of transformational leadership emphasize emotions, values, and the importance of leadership oriented to encouraging creativity in employees. Employees are a valuable resource in the firm, a resource for which the transformational leader takes responsibility and whose professional development he or she promotes (Bass, 1999, Bass and Avolio, 2000, García Morales et al., 2008a and García Morales et al., 2008b). Transformational leadership attempts to create emotional links with its followers and inspires higher values. Such leadership transmits the importance of having a shared mission and infusing a sense of purpose, direction and meaning into the followers’ labor (Bass, 1999). Transformational leadership becomes the motor and transmitter of innovative culture and of the dissemination of knowledge oriented to seeking the best possible organizational performance. The example of transformational leadership committed to the organization's goals and their internalization in its followers seeks to encourage commitment to results on the part of the organization's members (Bass, 1999 and Bass and Avolio, 2000). Transformational leaders have charisma, provide inspiration and promote intellectual stimulation (Bass, 1999, Bass and Avolio, 2000 and Conger, 1999). Charisma generates the pride, faith and respect that leaders work to encourage their employees to have in themselves, their leaders, and their organizations. Transformational leaders provide inspiration by motivating their followers, largely through communication of high expectations. Such leaders also promote intellectual stimulation by promoting employees’ intelligence, knowledge and learning so that employees can be innovative in their approach to problem solving and solutions. Various studies analyze the influence of transformational leadership on organizational performance through intermediate constructs such as culture (e.g., Ogbonna and Harris, 2000), entrepreneurship (e.g., García Morales et al., 2006), knowledge management (e.g., Gowen et al., 2009), congruence in top management teams (e.g., Colbert et al., 2008), flexibility (e.g., Rodriguez Ponce, 2007), human–capital–enhancing human resource management (Zhu et al., 2005), competitive strategies (e.g., Menguc et al., 2007), and absorptive capacity (e.g., García Morales et al., 2008a and García Morales et al., 2008b). However, understanding of the processes through which the leader exerts this influence is still limited and largely speculative (Bass, 1999 and Conger, 1999). This investigation seeks to analyze empirically whether transformational leadership exerts this influence on organizational performance through the intermediate influence of organizational learning and innovation. Organizational learning is the capability “within an organization to maintain or improve performance based on experience. This activity involves knowledge acquisition (the development or creation of skills, insights, and relationships), knowledge sharing (the dissemination to others of what has been acquired by some), and knowledge utilization (integration of learning so that it is assimilated and broadly available and can be generalized to new situations)” (DiBella et al., 1996, p. 363). Organizational learning is the process by which the organization increases the knowledge created by individuals in an organized way and transforms this knowledge into part of the organization's knowledge system. The process takes place within a community of interaction in which the organization creates knowledge, which expands in a constant dynamic between the tacit and the explicit (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). The development of new abilities and knowledge and the increase in the organization's capability enable organizational learning. Organizational learning involves cognitive and behavioral change. More than ever, organizational learning has become a need rather than a choice. Inability to learn is the reason most firms disappear before forty years have passed (Argyris and Schön, 1996 and Senge, 1990). The scientific literature proposes different definitions of innovation. This study uses the definition of innovation formulated by the Product Development and Management Association, which analyzes innovation as “a new idea, method, or device. The act of creating a new product or process. The act includes invention as well as the work required to bring an idea or concept into final form” (Belliveau et al., 2002, p. 446). Although research widely prescribes firm innovation as a means of improving organizational performance, many firms do not or cannot develop innovation properly. Researchers urge attention to what enables firms to innovate, to search for answers beyond semiautomatic stimulus–response processes (Zollo and Winter, 2002, p.341). Empirical studies support the relationship between organizational learning and innovation (Bueno et al., 2010, Cohen and Levinthal, 1990, Glynn, 1996, Hurley and Hult, 1998, Ireland et al., 2001 and Mezias and Glynn, 1993). Different types of learning and innovation are also related. For example, generative learning is the most advanced form of organizational learning and occurs when an organization is willing to question long-held assumptions about its mission, customers, capabilities, and strategy and to generate changes in its practices, strategies, and values. Such learning forms the necessary underpinnings for radical innovations in products, processes, and technologies (Argyris and Schön, 1996, Damanpour, 1991, Glynn, 1996, Senge, 1990 and Senge et al., 1994). The literature also emphasizes the great importance of organizational learning and innovation for a company's survival and effective performance. Organizational learning is a major component in any effort to improve organizational performance and strengthen competitive advantage. The development of new knowledge, derived from organizational learning, reduces the likelihood that a firm's competencies will become outdated, enabling the competencies to remain dynamic and thus favoring improvement in performance. Organizational learning usually has positive connotations, since this form of learning associates with performance improvements (Argyris and Schön, 1996, Fiol and Lyles, 1985, Inkpen and Crossan, 1995, Ireland et al., 2001 and Senge, 1990). Various authors also show that innovation is essential to improving performance and that innovation comes into play in order to improve organizational performance (Argyris and Schön, 1996, Damanpour, 1991, Fiol and Lyles, 1985, Hurley and Hult, 1998, Senge, 1990 and Zaltman et al., 1973). To summarize, this study analyzes the influence of transformational leadership on organizational learning and innovation and emphasizes the importance of providing empirical results that prove these relationships. The model also claims to demonstrate the existence of a positive and significant link between organizational learning and innovation and between these dynamic capabilities and organizational performance. The relatively slight attention paid in practice to these topics contrasts with their importance for technicians and practitioners. To achieve the objectives, the article develops as follows. Based on previous research, the section on hypotheses proposes a series of hypotheses on the influence of transformational leadership on organizational learning and organizational innovation, the influence of organizational learning on organizational innovation and the influence of both organizational learning and organizational innovation on organizational performance. The method section presents the data and the method used to analyze empirically the hypotheses developed in Spanish firms. The section on the results presents the findings. Finally, the section on conclusions and future research discusses the results and points out some of the limitations of this study.

Organizations need transformational leadership to improve their performance in changing real-life business environments. This research contributes to such performance improvement by showing the strategic role of organizational learning and organizational innovation. Management of these variables gives rise to values within the organization that are difficult to copy. Specifically, the results support all of the hypotheses, showing that a management style of transformational leadership through organizational learning and innovation simultaneously influences organizational performance. First, the research shows a positive relation between transformational leadership and organizational learning and innovation. This leadership style analyzes, modifies, and drives systems, designing them to share and transfer knowledge through the process of organizational learning (Lei et al., 1999 and Senge, 1990). Thus, transformational leadership is committed to and propels organizational learning (Senge, 1990 and Swieringa and Wierdsma, 1992), making available everything necessary to overcome the obstacles that might impede this learning (Wick and Leon, 1995). Organizational learning seeks to establish a path for professional development to acquire aptitudes or competencies that give sustainable advantage through innovation (Senge et al., 1994). The study also verifies a positive relation between transformational leadership and innovation directly and indirectly through the construction of competencies focused on learning to minimize the cost of internal change (Lei et al., 1999 and Slater and Narver, 1995). The results support the importance of transformational leadership in generating innovation (McDonough, 2000), an especially appealing finding that supports characterizing transformational leadership as more concerned with collective decisions, collective goals, and the generation of capabilities than is transactional leadership. Third, the study demonstrates empirically a positive relation between organizational learning and innovation. The innovative organization learns and knows how to make and keep itself competent. Through learning, the organization can change its behavior and thus renew and reinvent its technology and production to avoid falling into stagnation and to permit organizational innovation. Different organizations will find themselves in different states of evolution in learning. Organizational learning prevents stagnation and encourages continuous innovation (Bessant and Buckingham, 1993, Glynn, 1996 and Thomas et al., 2001). Fourth and finally, the study verifies empirically a positive relationship between more organizational learning and innovation and organizational performance. Organizations’ complexes of essential production and technology competences or resources and capacities sustain the sources for achieving sustainable competitive advantages. Each organization should analyze all of its production and technological resources, the resources that enable achievement of a better competitive position on the market. The organization should also develop specific capacities and essential competences to face the changes in production and technology in its environment. Thus, the organization acquires a dynamic and proactive vision that improves organizational performance, generating its own resources and capacities that are unique, valuable, hard to replace, and difficult to imitate. Two main variables that determine organizational performance are thus organizational learning and innovation, both of which have positive causal effects. These two dynamic capabilities are strategic (Calantone et al., 2002, Danneels and Kleinschmidt, 2001, Hurley and Hult, 1998 and Zahra et al., 2000). This investigation has several limitations. First, the study measures the variables based on the CEOs’ managerial perceptions (single respondents), which involve a certain degree of subjectivity. The respondents are CEOs of firms because their knowledge about these strategic variables is more comprehensive (e.g., Shortell and Zajac, 1990). In the absence of published data on these variables and alternative sources of comparative data, the study follows the methods used in the past by other studies (e.g., Egri and Herman, 2000, García Morales et al., 2008a, García Morales et al., 2008b, García Morales et al., 2008b, Nandakumar et al., 2010 and Sarros et al., 2008). However, the study here includes contrasting some variables with either objective data (e.g., organizational performance) or the response of the subordinates (e.g., transformational leadership) and finds no significant mean differences between the two types of measures. Further, the results from the correlation analysis show close relationships. A second limitation of this study concerns the measures of transformational leadership. Other investigations also survey CEOs or managers (e.g., Egri and Herman, 2000, Fein et al., 2010, García Morales et al., 2008a and Sarros et al., 2008). Although existing evidence suggests that self-reports of leadership are valid measures (e.g., Yukl and Van Fleet, 1991), interviewing and administering questionnaires to all other organizational members (and not only to subordinates) would have been preferable to verify leaders’ self-report of their behavior (e.g., Egri and Herman, 2000 and Sarros et al., 2008). One could also use different scales to measure transformational leadership. Third, although Harman's one-factor test and other method tests do not identify common method variance as a problem, this bias may still be present (Konrad and Linnehan, 1995 and Podsakoff and Organ, 1986). While Spector (2006) argues against assuming that the use of a single method automatically introduces systematic bias, studies recommend that future research gather measures of independent and dependent variables from varied data sources (e.g., more subordinates’ ratings of transformational leadership and objective measures of organizational innovation) to minimize the effects of any response bias (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Fourth, the study data are cross-sectional, hindering examination of the evolution of the variables in this study. This aspect is of particular interest given the dynamic nature of some variables. Although the authors test the most plausible directions for the pathways in the study model, only longitudinal research can assess the direction of causality of the relationship and detect possible reciprocal processes. The authors have tried to temper this limitation through attention to theoretical arguments by rationalizing the analyzed relationships and integrating temporal considerations into measurement of the variables (Hair et al., 1999). Fifth, future studies should analyze a larger sample, preferably in more than one country and in other sectors. Finally, the model only analyzes the relation between transformational leadership and organizational performance through organizational learning and organizational innovation. Although selected variables explain an acceptable amount of variance in organizational performance, research could analyze other intermediate constructs, such as shared vision, teamwork or technology (Senge et al., 1994). Future studies might also examine other consequences of introducing learning and innovation processes in organizations (e.g., quality improvement, staff satisfaction, and improvements in relational capacity). The homogeneous geographical context examined here limits the influence of external factors, but future research might well explicitly integrate the influence of external factors (Aragon Correa and Sharma, 2003).