The Relationship of Leader and Subordinate Influencing Activity in Naval Environments

Abstract

The purposes of this investigation were twofold. First, I examined the relative importance of transactional versus transformational naval officer leadership to three perceived outcomes: leader effectiveness, subordinate extra effort, and subordinate satisfaction. Second, I studied the comparative importance among rational, soft, and hard upward subordinate officer influence ap- proaches to the same three outcomes. Advanced United States Navy officers (N = 157) confidentially completed the Multifactor Officer Questionnaire- Form R (MOQ-R; Bass, Yamrnarino, & Kowalewski, 1987), assessing their most recent superior's degree of transformational and transactional leader- ship. One week later, the same 157 officers completed the Profiles of Organizational Influence Strategies-Form M (POIS-M; Kipnis & Schmidt, 1982). Analyses testing the significance of the difference among correlations generally revealed that transformational leadership and subordinate use of a rational approach were the influencing behaviors most strongly associated with perceived higher levels of leader effectiveness and subordinate satisfac- tion with the leader. No such relation was observed with subordinate extra effort. The implications of these findings and the primary role of leader charisma and subordinate rational influencing behavior are discussed.