Influences of transactional and transformational leadership on social, environmental and operational performance
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Abstract
The leadership style of administrators influences the performance of the companies they manage; however, most studies focus on relating it to economic and operational performance, ignoring social and environmental aspects. This study reports a structural equation model that relates transactional and transformational leadership as independent variables to social, operational and environmental performance as dependent variables through six hypotheses to quantify the relationship between these variables. To validate the hypotheses in the model, a questionnaire was designed and applied to managers of production processes in the Mexican maquiladora industry. 156 valid questionnaires were obtained, and the information was entered into SPSS v.24 software for filtering and validation. The model was evaluated using the least squares approach and reports a sensitivity analysis based on conditional probabilities for high and low occurrence scenarios in the variables. The results indicate that transactional and transformational leadership styles positively influence the social, operational and environmental performance of companies. However, transformational leadership has a greater impact than transactional leadership on each of the three types of performance measured, so it is concluded that, due to the nature of the maquiladora industry, it is better to invest resources in developing transformational leaders who have greater vision and inspiration, and who empower, motivate and develop their staff.
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