“You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership”. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Leadership is important. An organization’s success is often determined by the quality of its leadership (Greenberg, 2002) . Changing business practices, such as the use of the Internet and outsourcing, have important implications for the practice of leadership. As opposed to earlier beliefs on leadership that assumed that leaders were born, current research primarily assumes that leaders can be made. According to Kouzes and Posner (2002a) , “leadership is not the private reserve of a few charismatic men and women. It is a process ordinary people use when they are bringing forth the best from themselves and others” (p. xxiii) .

There has been extensive research performed in the last twenty years into similar leadership theories variously referred to as charismatic, transformational, or visionary leadership (Bass, 1985; Conger & Kanungo, 1994; Kouzes & Posner, 2002a) . What these theories have in common is that they focus on exceptional leaders who have extraordinary effects on their followers. In addition, these leaders cause employees to become both committed to the leader’s and the organization’s mission (McCann, Langford, & Rawlings, 2006) . Transformational leadership is one management practice that has increasingly become dominant in both public and private sector organizations (Judge & Bono, 2000; K. B. Lowe & Gardner, 2000; Walumbwa, Orwa, Wang, & Lawler, 2005) .

Two of the best known researchers of transformational leadership are James Kouzes and Barry Posner. According to Kouzes and Posner (2002b) , leaders who used five key leadership behaviors saw increased performance, higher retention rates, increased intrinsic motivation, and job satisfaction in their subordinates. These five behaviors are described in their management book The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes & Posner, 2002a) .

Good leaders recognize that a competitive advantage can be gained through human resources. As organizations and their leaders have realized that, research on organizational commitment has gained importance (Colbert & Kwon, 2000) . Organizational commitment is generally thought of as an individual’s identification with his or her organization (Steers, 1977) . There has been considerable interest in the study of organizational commitmen because of relationships between it and various measures of organizational efficiency and effectiveness (Beck & Wilson, 2000) .

Leadership is a key antecedent to organizational commitment. This article will explore the research on the effects of transformational leadership on organizational commitment and explain the leadership behaviors described by Kouzes and Posner (2002a) that academic leaders can follow.

Organizational Commitment

Organizational commitment is “the force that binds an individual to a course of action of relevance to one or more targets” (Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001, p. 301) . Organizational commitment has attracted interest because of its attempt to understand the intensity and stability of employee dedication to work organizations (Eisenberger, Fasolo, & Davis-LaMastro, 1990) . An employee’s commitment is a concern to all organizations because it has been linked to reduced turnover (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990) , increased knowledge sharing (Alvesson, 2001) , increased organizational citizenship behaviors (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, & Topolnytsky, 2002) , higher acceptance of organizational change (Iverson & Buttigieg, 1999; Iverson & McLeod, 1996) , ethical behavior (Wahn, 1993) and reduced absenteeism (Eby, Freeman, Rush, & Lance, 1999) .

Types of Commitment

Meyer and Allen (1991) proposed a three-component model of organizational commitment with affective, continuance, and normative components. The affective component “refers to the employee’s emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization” (p. 67) . Continuance commitment refers to the employee’s awareness of the costs associated with leaving the organization. Normative commitment reflects the employee’s feelings that he should remain with the organization, generally a feeling of a moral obligation. There have been other models of organizational commitment, however, Meyer and Allen’s (1991) model has been subjected to the greatest empirical scrutiny and has received the most support from researchers (Clugston, 2000; Meyer, Becker, & Vandenberghe, 2004) .

Antecedents and Consequences of Commitment

While leadership is one of the key antecedents of organizational commitment, it is not the only one. Figure 1 shows the antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment.

Figure 1: Antecedents and Consequences of Organizational Commitment

Organizational Commitment and Leadership

One of the critical antecedents of organizational commitment is leadership. Shamir and colleagues (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993; Shamir, Zakay, Breinin, & Popper, 1998) suggest that transformational leaders influence organizational commitment by raising the level of intrinsic value associated with goal accomplishment and by creating a higher level of personal commitment on the part of the leader and followers to a common vision, mission, and organizational goals. Table 2 summarizes the major research on transformational leadership and organizational commitment.

Table 2: Organizational Commitment (OC) and Transformational Leadership

Niehoff, Enz, and Grover (1990) studied how both transactional and transformational leadership styles related to affective organizational commitment. They found that both leadership styles had a significant positive relationship with affective organizational commitment. They further found that the relationship was stronger with affective organizational commitment than with job satisfaction. Similarly, Walumbwa, Orwa, Wang, and Lawler (2005) explored the relationship between transformational leadership, and affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction at several banking organizations. They found that transformational leadership had a strong and positive effect on both affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction.

The level of affective organizational commitment before and after the supervisor had attended leadership training was studied by Barling, Weber, and Kelloway (1996) using a sample of banking. The study showed that transformational leadership training increases the affective organizational commitment to the organization.

Using charismatic leadership behaviors and its relationship to organizational commitment Rowden (2000) found that charismatic leader behaviors, such as sensitivity to member needs and having a clear vision, were positively related to affective organizational commitment.

Gunter (1997) examined the effects of perceived leadership behavior and affective organizational commitment using music company employees and found that affective organizational commitment was related to the LPI leadership behaviors. He also found higher levels of commitment for females than for males. Lowe (2000) examined the effects of perceived leadership behavior and affective organizational commitment using fire service employees. He used the LPI to measure the perception of leadership and found that the practices advocated did increase the level of affective organizational commitment. His study was replicated by Metscher (2005) on Air Force personnel and civil service employees. Bell-Roundtree (2004) replicated and expanded these studies using a sample of knowledge workers and by also measuring job satisfaction. She found that employees reported higher levels of affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction when managers practiced the five transformational leadership behaviors. McCroskey (2007) replicated these earlier studies with petroleum product redistributors and hedge-fund trading employees and expanded upon them by also including continuance and normative commitments.

A positive link between transformational leadership and affective organizational commitment was found in a study by Bono and Judge (2003) comprised of leaders holding supervisory, or managerial positions, and the individuals who reported directly to them from nine organizations in industries ranging from advertising to aerospace, including both service and manufacturing organizations.

The Leadership Behaviors

While there is little research on the relationship between transformational leadership behaviors and organizational commitment in an educational setting (Nguni, Sleegers, & Denessen, 2006) , educational administrators can use the same concepts researched in other industries. The five leadership behaviors outlined by Kouzes and Posner (2002a) are good techniques for educational administrators to follow for several reasons: amount of research done using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), volume of articles about the concepts, and the number of training workshops, seminars, and publications about these concepts. The details of which can be found easily on the website, www.theleadershipchallenge.com.

The Leadership Practices Inventory was introduced by Barry Posner and James Kouzes in their book The Leadership Challenge in 1988. Kouzes and Posner (2002a) began sending out surveys and doing in-depth interviews in 1983 to determine how leaders mobilized others to want to get extraordinary things done in organizations. The Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) was developed through a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative research. The research resulted in a framework of five leadership practices: modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart. A good video of James Kouzes describing The Leadership Challenge can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LddxRqX3vh0

Following several iterative psychometric processes, the resulting instrument, the LPI, has been administered to more than 350,000 individuals across a variety of organizations, disciplines, and demographic backgrounds (Kouzes & Posner, 2002b) . Table 1 summarizes the five leadership practices and associated commitments.

Table 1: Leadership Practices and Commitments

The next five sections briefly describe the five leadership practices and associated commitments.

Model the Way

Kouzes and Posner