Towards Understanding Transformational Leadership in India: A Grounded Theory Approach

Abstract

An important factor that contributes to successful organizational transformation is leadership. Transformational leaders take strategic decisions and give shape to such changes, thereby ensuring that their organizations stay competitive. While the core of transformational leadership is universal, timeless and immanent, its behavioural manifestations, however, differ across cultures. This paper attempts to take a preliminary look at those behavioural manifestations of transformational leadership that are unique to Indian culture, most of which have been drawn from Singh and Bhandarker's (1988) model. After using the grounded theory method for data generation, 1617 response sets obtained from 250 working managers were content analyzed. Results show that the universal dimension of transformational leadership constitutes 44 per cent of the responses, while culture-specific dimensions constitute the rest. The 56 per cent Indian cultural dimensions have been operationalized through seven sub-dimensions, ‘Nurturant’ (20 per cent), ‘Personal Touch’ (13 per cent), ‘Expertise’ (7 per cent), ‘Simple-Living-High-Thinking’ (7 per cent), ‘Loyalty’ (4 per cent), ‘Self-Sacrifice’ (3 per cent), and ‘Giving Model of Motivation’ (2 per cent). The paper concludes by discussing the importance of recognizing culture-specific manifestations for leading change.