Date of Award
2023
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Psychology, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Ronald Riggio
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Becky Reichard
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Michelle Bligh
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Rights Information
© 2023 Haoxiong Li
Keywords
psychological needs, self-determination theory, transformational leadership
Subject Categories
Psychology
Abstract
The current research addresses the scarcity of studies exploring the motivational antecedents of transformational leadership, which focuses on developing followers for extraordinary performance. Grounded in the Self-Determination Theory, I propose that leaders' psychological needs satisfaction is associated with transformational leadership. Specifically, leaders' autonomous motivation, mindfulness, and positive affect are outcomes of their satisfaction of basic psychological needs and act as motivating factors for exhibiting transformational leadership behaviors. I conducted two studies to test these hypotheses. Study 1, a correlational study, aimed to establish relationships among the constructs. A sample of 238 leaders with at least two subordinates participated in an online survey. The findings indicated that leaders' autonomous motivation and mindfulness mediated the relationship between leaders’ satisfaction of psychological needs and transformational leadership, while positive affect did not exhibit significant mediation. The direct association between satisfaction of psychological needs and transformational leadership was not established. To further investigate the causal nature of the relationship between satisfaction of psychological needs and transformational leadership, as well as capture the dynamics of state-like constructs, Study 2 was conducted as a longitudinal diary study using cross-lagged panel analysis. Eighty participants completed four consecutive diary surveys over a four-week period, recruited through an online convenience sampling strategy. The results of Study 2 demonstrated that leaders' autonomous motivation, but not mindfulness or positive affect, mediated the relationship between their satisfaction of psychological needs and transformational leadership. I also found that transformational leadership predicted leaders' positive affect, mindfulness, and autonomous motivation. The current research offers several contributions. It took an innovative approach exploring the connection between Self-Determination Theory and transformational leadership, through focusing on leaders’ satisfaction of psychological needs and autonomous motivation and examining the influence of these internal experiences and states on their transformational leadership behaviors. Practically, the current research implies that leaders can promote their own transformational leadership behaviors through satisfying their own psychological needs in training programs. In future research, I recommend conducting intervention and experimental studies with longitudinal designs and collecting data from multiple sources.
ISBN
9798381897890
Recommended Citation
Li, Haoxiong. (2023). What motivates transformational leaders? On the relationship between leaders’ satisfaction of basic psychological needs and transformational leadership. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 735. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/735.
