Introduction
An important type of leadership known as ‘Transformation Leadership’ facilitates the introduction of new ideas in organisations by providing vision, motivation, and intellectual simulation (see book by Bass, 1990 for more detail). Green transformational leadership then is along this same concept, but focused on environmental ideas, vision and motivation. Green performance is the innovation of new products and processes that the organisation is attempting to introduce.
The study
This research by Chen et al. (2014) looked at how green transformational leadership can effect the green performance of an organisation. They also hypothesised that this relationship will be mediated by self-efficacy and green mindfulness. Green self-efficacy is the idea that employees believe that they as a group (organisation) will be able to achieve their environmental sustainability goals and aspirations. They introduce the idea of green mindfulness as a state of awareness of the context and content of environmental knowledge.
What did they find?
They found that green transformational leadership positively influences green mindfulness, green self-efficacy, and green performance. Green mindfulness and green self-efficacy act to partially mediate this relationship between green transformational leadership and green performance of the organisation. It should be noted that while these effects were all significant and reasonably in strength, none were very strong predictors.
What does this mean?
It means that green transformational leadership can positively affect green performance directly and also indirectly through green mindfulness and green self-efficacy. This would mean that increasing the capabilities of leaders in organisation to display the characteristics of ‘transformational leadership’, especially in relation to green aspects would have a positive effect of the green innovative performance of the R & D of the organisation.