Relationship between Proactive Personality Traits and Transformational Leadership Style among Workers: Moderating Role of Psychological Empowerment

The purpose of this study is to investigate relationship between proactive personality traits and transformational leadership style among workers: moderating role of psychological empowerment. The study was guided by two hypotheses. A total of 112 participants were selected for the study using simple random and convenience sampling technique. The participants were all non-teaching staff of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra-Nigeria. The participants comprised of 62 males and 50 females with a mean age of 32.51 and standard deviation of 8.68. Their age ranged from 18 to 51 years. The study made use of three instruments namely: proactive personality scale by Bateman & Crant (1993), transformational leadership inventory by Podsakoff (1990) and psychological empowerment scale by Spreitzer (1995). The study is a survey study which adopted the correlational design; consequently multiple linear regressions were used as a statistical tool for data analysis. The result showed that proactive personality positively and significantly correlated with transformational leadership style at r = .33, p < .01. Furthermore, the interaction effect between proactive personality trait, all the dimensions of psychological empowerment accounted for negative significant variance than just proactive personality and transformational leadership styles alone, R2 change = .07 at p <. 01. Based on the findings of the study, the researchers recommended that Organizations are advised to employ transformational leadership styles as it is also a way of empowering the employees psychologically.