Transformational Leadership Model and Corporate Performance Mediated by Organizational Culture: Evidence from State-Owned Enterprises in Emerging Economies

This paper’s main objective is to determine whether transformational leadership model has an impact on the performance of state-owned enterprises in emerging economies in view of the continued underperformances by a majority of these enterprises due to a diverse contextual constraints. A positivism research paradigm and cross-sectional research design were adopted and a Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ5) was used to collect data from the sampled 78 state-owned enterprises in Zimbabwe. The Logistics Regression and the Ordinary Least Squares methods were used to analyse data. Charisma/Role Model, Contingent Rewards and Individual Consideration traits of the Transformational Leadership model confirmed the paper’s hypothesis that Transformational leadership model has a positive impact on the performance of SOEs. Therefore, practical recommendations are that SOEs should adopt and institutionalize the transformational leadership traits such as Charisma/Role Model, Contingent Rewards and Individual Consideration traits as these positively and significantly impact on organizational outcomes which in turn can improve the performance and relevance of SOEs. The research advances new insights on leadership in SOEs operating in a challenging environment which can be extended to other African countries thereby extending research on SOEs’ contributions to other emerging economies.

Transformational leadership, corporate performance

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