Are We On the Same Page? Effects of Self-Awareness of Empowering and Transformational Leadership

Abstract

This study examines the effects of leaders' self-awareness of their own leadership on followers' satisfaction, self-leadership, and leader effectiveness. A leader's self-awareness was conceptualized as the degree of similarity between the leader's self-description and his or her followers' descriptions of leader behaviors. Transformational and empowering leadership are measured from 48 leaders and 222 of their followers. Results from confirmatory factor analyses provide support for two types of leadership: transformational and empowering. Results from polynomial regression analyses indicate that self-awareness of transformational leadership is related to leader effectiveness and followers' supervisory satisfaction. In contrast, self-awareness of empowering leadership is related to followers' self-leadership. These effects of leadership self-awareness extend beyond the direct effect of leadership on the outcome variables.