Meta-Analysis of the Relationships between Different Leadership Practices and Organizational, Teaming, Leader, and Employee Outcomes

The meta-analysis described in this paper evaluated the relationships between 11 types of leadership practices and 7 organizational, teaming, leader, and employee outcomes. A main focus of analysis was whether the leadership practices were differentially related to the study outcomes. Studies were eligible for inclusion if the correlations between leadership subscale measures (rather than global measures of leadership) and outcomes of interest were reported. The random effects weighted average correlations between the independent and dependent measures were used as the sizes of effects for evaluating the influences of the leadership practices on the outcome measures. One hundred and twelve studies met the inclusion criteria and included 39,433 participants. The studies were conducted in 31 countries in different kinds of programs, organizations, companies, and businesses. Ninety-six percent of the practice-outcome effect sizes were statistically significant where approximately half of the relationships were moderated by organizational types (for-profit, not-for-profit, education, healthcare, government, etc.). Results indicated that the 11 types of leadership practices were differentially related to the study outcomes even in the presence of considerable between study heterogeneity. Implications for leadership development are described.