Signal, Substrate, and Boundary: A Costly Signalling Perspective on Transformational Leadership
Project Description
This dissertation develops a costly-signalling account of transformational leadership (TL). For forty years, TL research has rested on follower ratings that conflate signal with reception, leaving its dimensions behaviourally underspecified. Charismatic leadership has been operationalised through the Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs) and analysed as a costly signalling system; this work extends that logic to the full five-factor TL repertoire.
Theoretically, the dissertation derives a differentiated cost architecture: idealised influence-attributed is maintenance-dominant, inspirational motivation production-dominant, intellectual stimulation cognitive-developmental, individualised consideration relational-multiplicative. A 3×2 experiment (N=433) varying four nonverbal CLTs across three media produces an effect-size gradient tracking the cost ordering rather than CL-II proximity, providing first empirical traction for the framework.
Psychologically, self-leadership emerges as the trainable substrate whose strategy clusters - behavioural automatisation, motivational reorientation, cognitive restructuring - map onto those cost demands. A survey of 333 leaders shows flow mediating most strongly for activation-intensive dimensions; a field study (N=150) shows follower self-leadership gaining explanatory weight as leader signals thin under geographic distance.
Theoretically, the dissertation derives a differentiated cost architecture: idealised influence-attributed is maintenance-dominant, inspirational motivation production-dominant, intellectual stimulation cognitive-developmental, individualised consideration relational-multiplicative. A 3×2 experiment (N=433) varying four nonverbal CLTs across three media produces an effect-size gradient tracking the cost ordering rather than CL-II proximity, providing first empirical traction for the framework.
Psychologically, self-leadership emerges as the trainable substrate whose strategy clusters - behavioural automatisation, motivational reorientation, cognitive restructuring - map onto those cost demands. A survey of 333 leaders shows flow mediating most strongly for activation-intensive dimensions; a field study (N=150) shows follower self-leadership gaining explanatory weight as leader signals thin under geographic distance.
