Instrumental Leadership: Extending the Transformational-Transactional Leadership Paradigm

Although the transformational-transactional leadership paradigm is successful in explaining considerable portions of variance in organizationally relevant outcome criteria, recent critiques emphasized that this paradigm might be incomplete. Thus, Antonakis and House (2002) suggested that instrumental leadership might extend the transformational-transactional leadership paradigm and allow for a more detailed and realistic description of the leadership phenomenon. The present study is the first to test – among basic aspects of construct validity – the prognostic validity of instrumental leadership with regard to performance and job satisfaction. Results from three independent empirical studies revealed that four dimensions of instrumental leadership (i.e., Environmental Monitoring, Strategy Formulation, Path-Goal Facilitation, and Outcome Monitoring) can be distinguished. As for concurrent validity, Environmental Monitoring and Path-Goal Facilitation were related to job satisfaction. This result was obtained while controlling for transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership, lending support for the incremental validity of instrumental leadership. With regard to the predictive validity, Environmental Monitoring, Strategy Formulation, and Path-Goal Facilitation (assessed at T1) were related to subsequent objective performance (assessed at T2) in a second study. Finally, in a third study, Path-Goal Facilitation (T1) was associated with subsequent job satisfaction and affective commitment (both T2). Overall, these results demonstrate that potentially, instrumental leadership is a valid extension to the transformational-transactional leadership paradigm.