Why culture matters to leadership, motivation, and willing organizational commitment?

Our research explores the relationships between transformational leadership idealized influence, employee motivation levels, and the development of willing organizational commitment. We conduct that exploration within the context of cultural differences that shed light on the importance of national culture as a differentiating shaper of employee perceptions, feelings and behaviours. We focus on two forms of idealized influence that are central to transformational leadership: idealized influence (behaviour) and idealized influence (attributed) to examine the efficacy of transformational leadership on the development of willing organizational commitment. Our interest in the development of willing organizational commitment reflects recent findings which show positive relationships between organizational commitment and desirable organizational outcomes such as an increase in organizational citizenship behaviours. Rather than treating organizational commitment as a unitary phenomenon, we consider a more fruitful approach is to treat it as a formative construct consisting of two importantly different forms: normative and affective. Data was gathered from two manufacturing organizations in two different countries (Iran and Australia) enabling us to explore and articulate the differing impacts of those two national cultures regarding the effect of idealized influence upon the development of willing organizational commitment, taking the mediating role of motivation into account. Partial Least Squares was employed to develop a causal model that measures the mediating effect of motivational levels on the relationships between the two forms of idealized influence and organizational willing commitment. When our findings are broken down further, they indicate that, as expected, idealized influence (behaviour) has a significant effect on the development of willing organizational commitment in both organizations.