Perceived Transformational Leadership, Organizational Commitment, and Citizenship Behavior: A Case Study in Intercollegiate Athletics

This study tested the propositions that (a) perceived leader-member exchange quality (LMX) between second level managers (e.g., associate, assistant athletic directors) and their subordinates would be associated with perceived transformational leadership behaviors (TL) of the athletic director, and (b) subordinates' organizational commitment (OC) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) would be correlated with both perceived TL and LMX. Seventy-five third tier employees of a large Midwestern university responded to the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire-MLQ (Bass, 1985); LMX-7 (Graen, Novak, & Sommerkamp, 1982), an organizational citizenship scale (MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Fetter, 1991); and an organizational commitment scale (Meyer & Allen, 1997). Correlational and regression analyses showed that the three dimensions of TL were significantly correlated with LMX. Additionally, the dimensions of TL and LMX were differentially related to OC and OCB.