Leadership styles and organizational outcomes in engineering societies' local chapters.

摘要

Numerous studies have focused on business, government, and nonprofit organizations and have shown that appropriate leadership actions, tailored to the organization's current environment and future needs, have positive impacts on organizational effectiveness. Engineering societies comprise a significant proportion of nonprofit organizational membership but this study's Literature Review found a scarcity of research conducted to study how various leadership styles affect nonprofit engineering society organization performance. The chosen environment for this study was the population of the leaders of local sections of professional engineering societies. The research focused on how transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles, and organizational outcomes including effort, effectiveness, and satisfaction, were influenced by participants' demographic variables. These variables included such factors as the leaders' own background, other local leaders' styles, membership willingness to participate in local activities, and activities sponsored by parallel and competing organizations for the members' interests. This study's results reinforced findings from previous research which indicated a strong positive correlation between transformational leadership style and organizational effectiveness, a weak correlation between transactional leadership style and organizational effectiveness, and a strong negative correlation between laissez-faire leadership style and organizational effectiveness. The results also indicated support for the positive benefits on organizational effectiveness of surrounding a section's principal leader with other section leaders having equivalent or stronger scores in transformational leadership, and of increased experience in the local section's leadership positions.