Communicating the Vision: How Face‐to‐Face Dialogue Facilitates Transformational Leadership

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Donald P. Moynihan,Ulrich Thy Jensen,Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12922

350 Public Administration Review • May | June 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 350–361. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12922.

Research Article

Ulrich Thy Jensen is assistant professor

in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona

State University. His research focuses on

the interplay between work motivation

and behaviors of public service providers

and how leadership shapes performance in

public organizations.

E-mail: ujensen@asu.edu

Donald P. Moynihan is director of

the La Follette School of Public Affairs

and Epstein and Kellett Professor

of Public Affairs at the University of

Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author, most

recently, of Toward Next-Generation

Performance Budgeting, published by

the World Bank in 2016. He was the 2014

recipient of the Kershaw Award, given every

two years to a scholar under age 40 for

outstanding contributions to the study of

public policy and management.

E-mail: dmoynihan@lafollette.wisc.edu

Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen is

associate professor in the Department

of Management at Aarhus University,

Denmark. Her main research interests

include public management; strategic

communication in the public sector,

in particular reputation management

and leadership communication; and

relationships between top civil servants,

ministers, and political advisors. She has

published on those topics in journals such

as Public Administration, International

Review of Administrative Sciences,

International Journal of Strategic

Communication, and Administration

& Society .

E-mail: hhs@mgmt.au.dk

Ulrich Thy Jensen

Arizona State University

Donald P. Moynihan

University of Wisconsin– Madison

Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen

Aarhus University

Communicating the Vision: How Face-to-Face Dialogue

Facilitates Transformational Leadership

Abstract: For public managers facing political and structural constraints, transformational leadership promises

to meaningfully improve outcomes by communicating an inspiring vision of the organization. But this promise

rests to a great degree on the communication skills and behaviors of the leader. A better understanding of how

transformational leadership functions in organizations therefore requires a deeper application of theory from the field

of communications. This article explores the question of what communication behaviors facilitate transformational

leadership. A media richness framework is applied to propose that transformational leaders will be most effective when

employing a face-to-face dialogue approach to communication. Using a multisource longitudinal research design, the

authors find support for this proposition in an empirical test of 256 Danish tax units, lower and upper secondary

schools, child care centers, and bank branches. The findings also show that size matters, with diminishing effectiveness

of face-to-face dialogue in larger organizations .

Evidence for Practice

• When employees see their leader as transformational, they are more likely to be attracted to the mission of

the organization.

• Leaders can choose different types of communication behaviors with employees, relying on a mixture of

one-way and two-way exchanges and written and oral communications.

• The positive effects of transformational leadership on employee attraction to the organizational mission

become stronger when the leader relies extensively on a face-to-face dialogue approach to communication.

• A face-to-face approach is time intensive and less feasible in larger organizations, where leaders have less

capacity to engage with all employees.

T ransformational leadership is attractive in

public settings for a number of reasons.

For scholars, it aligns well with the public

service motivation approach that dominates public

management accounts of motivation. For the world

of practice, transformational leadership promises

that the right type of inspiring leader can improve

performance without investing extra financial

resources or engaging in politically difficult structural

reorganizations. Whether such promises are fulfilled

is an empirical question, however, demanding better

evidence on whether and under what conditions

transformational leadership makes a difference.

The promise of transformational leadership, to

a greater degree than other leadership strategies,

rests on the communication skills of the leader.

While the transactional leader relies on the use of

objective punishments and rewards, and the servant

leader succeeds by visibly supporting followers,

the transformational leader is expected to engage

in an alchemy of exceptional change through the

communication of an idealized portrait of what the

organization aspires to achieve (Carton, Murphy,

and Clark 2014 ). This vision, in turn, increases

employees ’ attraction to their organization ’ s purpose,

which, ultimately, is expected to be important for

performance because employees invest greater energy

and effort toward goals they perceive as meaningful

and significant. But this causal chain of theorized

behaviors is halted if the leader fails to communicate

the vision, since “an organization ’ s mission can only

inspire those who are aware of its existence, and

understand its importance” (Moynihan, Pandey, and

Wright 2014 , 95).

Transformational leaders ’ ability to convey values and

increase mission valence among employees rests, at

least partly, on their communication of the vision.

This extraordinary reliance on communication is the

blind spot of transformational leadership theory (but

see Men 2014a , 2014b ). For a form of leadership that

inherently depends on communication, we know little

about what communication behaviors, if any, amplify