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Walking the Talk: The Relationship Between Leadership and Communication Competence.

October 27, 2000 

"This study is in response to the global question, 'How are communication and leadership linked?'  Members in nine organizations completed self-report instruments that rated their leadership behavior across three dimensions and their leaders' communication competence across two dimensions.  A three-dimensional integrated model of leadership was theoretically and operationally defined as a combination of transactional leadership, transformational leadership, and the quality of exchange in leader-member dyads.  This model was used to categorize members; perceptions of leaders' effectiveness and this effectiveness assessment was related to members' perceptions of leaders' communication competence.

Transactional and transformational leadership were measured using subscales of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Bass, 1985b, 1985c).  The leader-member exchange dimension was measured by a subscale consisting of six items of the LMX-6 scale (Schriesheim, Neider, Scandura & Tepper, 1992).  Communication competence was assessed by the 12-item Communicator Competence Questionnaire (Monge et al, 1981).

Members in high-quality leader-member dyads rate their leaders as high in communicative competence.  The relationship is the highest among all of the variables in the study.

The communicative competence of the leaders, and its affect on communication effectiveness as evidenced by member participation of leader-member agreement, appears to be a necessary precondition for a high quality leader-member exchange relationship.  At the lower levels of communication competence, high quality leader-member relationships do not exist.

Leaders who use transactional leadership behaviors are rated, by their members as higher in communicative competence than are those who do not.  The relationship, however, is lower than is the relationship between any other variables in the study.  Transactional leadership requires a level of communication competence that allows the leader to negotiate the leader-member explicit or implicit contract and to monitor the resulting transactions.

The three factors that constitute transformational leadership, charisma, individual consideration, and intellectual stimulation, are communication-based.  Members report a high relationship between transformational leadership and communication competence.  Transformational leadership is the best single predictor of communication competence.  That is, transformational leadership explains more of the variance in communication competence than do the other dimensions.

The best single predictor of communication competence is leader-member exchange. R2 for transformational leadership is less than that for leader-member exchange, but not significantly so.  Transactional leadership is a distant third as a predictor of communication competence.  Transactional leadership adds no predictive ability to the full model and is only marginally significant to the partial models (1999, Flauto, pp. 86-96)."

Reference:  Flauto, F. J. (1999).  Walking the talk: The relationship between leadership and communication competence.  The Journal of Leadership Studies, 6 (1/2), 86-96.

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Created: 2008-02-26, Updated: 2009-02-17