HCBE Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Department

H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship

Advisor

Ramdas Chandra

Committee Member

Bahaudin G Mujtaba

Committee Member

Barry Barnes

Abstract

The research herein was developed to gain a robust understating of the relationship of transformational leadership and work environment in East Africa (Bass & Avolio, 1994). Likewise, the study provides additional data and an examination of what correlation and impact the aforementioned have on organizational commitment. The research faced many challenges, including examining a new model in a high context society that relies heavily on enriched clan, subclan, tribes, super tribes, and communal relationships, which had not been tested prior. Valid and reliable survey instruments included 60 questions from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X), 90 questions from the Work Environment Survey (WES), 30 questions from the Three-Component Model (TCM), and a demographic survey, which ensured research efforts were consistent with previous studies (Bass & Avolio, 1994; Meyer & Allen, 1991; Moos & Insel, 2008). Over 15,121 emails from 63 countries were sent out randomly from the Directory of Development Organizations (2010) database. The degree of accuracy and a high degree of validity was reached at a rate of .05 (Krejcie & Morgan, 1970). A response rate of 36.4% was achieved, which was acceptable for the study. The study relied on English as the language of choice, given that over 2,000 dialects and languages exist in East Africa, thereby reducing contextual risk significantly. The statistical methodology used incorporated advanced SPSS software to process the Mahalanobis distance and Pearson coefficients to test five hypotheses. There were 188 cases available for analysis and 22 cases identified through Mahalanobis distance as multivariate outliers. The findings conformed to previous studies of transformational leadership and organizational commitment in organizations as being highly significant and correlative. Work environment was found not to be significant to transformational leadership or organizational commitment. Therefore, more research is required to understand this phenomenon and to make recommendations to leaders and managers to increase levels of influence and encouragement in the work environment. By doing so, a greater return of investment should be obtained for companies, for work areas, and for the work force, which participates in the global marketplace.

  Link to NovaCat

Included in

Business Commons

COinS