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Social distance as a moderator of the effects of transformational leadership: Both neutralizer and enhancer

Management department at the M.J. Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, m.s.cole{at}tcu.edu

Heike Bruch

Institute for Leadership and Human Resources Management of the University of St Gallen (Switzerland), heike.bruch{at}unisg.ch

Boas Shamir

Faculty of Social Sciences, and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, msshamir{at}mscc.huji.ac.il

Following recent interest in contextual factors and how they might influence the effects of transformational leadership, we consider the social distance between leaders and followers as a cross-level moderator of the relationships between senior level managers’ transformational leadership and individual-level outcomes. Our sample comprised 268 individuals in 50 leader-follower groups. Results revealed that high social distance reduced or neutralized transformational leadership’s association with followers’ emulation of leader behavior. In contrast, high levels of social distance between leaders and followers enhanced the effects of transformational leadership on individuals’ perceptions of their units’ positive emotional climate and individuals’ sense of collective efficacy. Results not only highlight the importance of social distance as a contextual variable affecting leader-follower relations but also suggest that the same contextual variable may have differential effects, enhancing some relationships and neutralizing others.

Key Words: affect • context • efficacy • leadership development • multilevel

This version was published on November 1, 2009

Human Relations, Vol. 62, No. 11, 1697-1733 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0018726709346377


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