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Transformational Leadership and Group Climate - Empirical Results from Symphony Orchestras

July 27, 2006

"Literature gives us several indications on how transformational leadership increases success in groups and organizations (Avolio et al, 1999; Bass, 1998; De Dreu & Weingart, 2003; Fuller et al, 1996; Lowe, Kroeck & Sivasubramaniam, 1996).  The positive effects of transformational leadership in organizations seem to depend largely not only on the specific performance criteria, but on particular situational conditions (Gebert, 2002; Ehrhart & Klein, 2001).  The question of whether a cooperative group climate among the followers is a prerequisite for the success of transformational leadership is investigated in the context of symphony orchestras.  We assume the conductor's transformational leadership promotes the artistic quality of a symphony orchestra only if there is a highly cooperative climate in the orchestra.

The particular need for a motivating leadership style in the orchestra becomes clear once one considers the special nature of the leadership constellation in an orchestra.  Generally, musicians do not participate in developing the orchest4ra's conception for the interpretation o n the composition and they don't have much freedom in following this adaptation.  We assume that a conductor with a transformational leadership style is successful because he fosters the musicians' motivation and hence also their effort in three ways: First, the conductor, who is perceived as charismatic, conveys trust and optimism, because with musicians accredit him with high artistic competence (Lebrecht, 2001).  Second, a conductor with a transformational leadership style conveys his artistic conception as a vision.  Third, a transformationally leading conductor enhances the musicians' intellectual stimulation.

Based on the specific task of the orchestra members, many of the dimensions for climate discussed in literature, like autonomy, structurization, hierarchization (Neuberger, 1980), reward orientation (Campbell et al. 1970) or pressure and recognition (Koys & DeCotiis 1991) should all be constant and thus not relevant to success.  A cooperative climate in an orchestra is on hand, if the climate is shaped by the musicians' mutual estimation and the absence of conflicts within the groups of musicians.

The hypothesis, Transformational leadership by the conductor will be positively related with the artistic quality of an orchestra's achievement only if it is accompanied by a highly cooperative group climate in the orchestra, was tested through written questionnaires completed by 208 musicians from 22 German symphony orchestras, most of which were part of opera companies (von Streit, 2003).    The return rate was 76 percent.  The participating orchestras have an average membership of musicians (S.D. = 17).  In order to receive a ten percent sample of every orchestra, we included no more than 12 musicians per orchestra in the study.  The average age of the respondents was 40 years (S.D. = 8.83), with the average length of professional experience in an orchestra of 15 years (S.D. = 9.39).  The sample corresponds largely to the actual composition of an orchestra in terms of the section of the musicians (62 percent strings, 36 percent woodwind and brass, 2 percent percussion) and in terms of the position in the orchestra.  More than half of the musicians (67 percent) were tutti players; 33 percent were soloists or principals, i.e., leaders of an instrument group.

The group climate in the orchestra and the artistic quality of a performance are purposefully ascertainable only at group level, the orchestra as a whole (Joyce and Slocum, 1990, p. 133).  For each orchestra, the responses by the musicians (scored on a seven-point Likert scale) were aggregated into a mean score on the constructs of interest in this study (transformational leadership, group climate in the orchestra, and the artistic quality of the ensemble). The conductor's transformational leadership was operationalized by the three facets of transformational leadership identified by Avolio et al. (1999) -  charisma (…has charisma; we are proud to work with him), inspirational motivation (…clarifies his objectives with imagery and gestures; makes it clearly understandable to us what he wants us to do), and intellectual stimulation (…often makes completely new, convincing suggestions for interpretation; enables us to see familiar works in a new light).  Participants' perceptions of the group climate in the orchestra were assessed with eight items concerning how the colleagues in the orchestra rated their mutual estimation and the level of conflict in their orchestra.  Since quality is commonly used as a measure of success of arts organizations (Auvinen, 2001, p. 274), in this investigation the artistic quality of the orchestra served as the measure of the ensemble's achievement.

To test the hypothesis, we conducted a multiple hierarchical regression analysis with artistic quality of the orchestra regressed on cooperative group climate, transformational leadership, and their interaction.

Our results support the notion that a conductor's transformational leadership style in an orchestra does not generally increase the artistic quality of the orchestra only if it is accompanied by highly cooperative group climate in the orchestra.  The first methodological limitation of this study is the following: The chosen cross-sectional design allows no assumptions to be made about causality of the discovered correlations.  Another lingering problem is the measurement of the orchestra's artistic quality.  It would be desirable for future studies to measure artistic quality exclusively from the perspective of additional sources.  For theoretical conclusions of the study, the most important finding is that a conductor's transformational leadership by itself does not generally predict high artistic quality of the orchestra, but only on condition of a highly cooperative group climate in the orchestra (Boerner & Von Streit, 2005, p. 30-41)."

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Created: 2007-08-28, Updated: 2009-02-17