A research on transformational leadership and institutionalization correlation

Transformational Leadership is a style of leadership which has effective role on creating difference among subordinates and companies. This difference is valuable and positive for both subordinates and ultimate goals of the company. Meaningful changes have influence on the sense of identity. Institutionalization is a process that is necessary for companies to cope with challenges resulted from changes at business environment. In order to ensure their durability and to provide competition advantages, companies should follow some critical policies. Institutionalization is one of the most remarkable tools between those policies. Institutionalization deals with integration of the existing norms, values and patterns with new ones. Firms may already have rules, norms, standards or procedures; however, creating and realizing them independently from people is possible only with institutionalization. However, institutionalization cannot be developed without a reason; a leading person with enough qualifications for organizing and affecting employees can lead it. Who is this leading person? What are qualifications and necessities of her/him? May it be transformational leader? The study consists of six chapters. The first chapter is Introduction part that includes abstract, Turkish summary, preface, and table of contents, list of figures and list of tables. Following sections begin with literature review. First of all, Leadership with its history, theories and types was handled as the second chapter. The third part is about Transformational Leadership with sub-sections such as historical background and dimensions. Then, Institutionalization was studied as the fourth chapter while Research Methodology and Hypothesis part constitutes the fifth chapter. The last but not the least, the sixth chapter is the Conclusion and Recommendations part. The main purpose of the study is to examine whether there is correlation between transformational leadership and institutionalization. Correlation between Transformational Leadership and Institutionalization was analyzed via questionnaires. Sample group of the study is companies in the Adana Hacı Sabancı Organized Industrial Zone. By January 2018, 354 firms were taken into consideration and all of them included to the study. The survey was created at an online platform and its link was delivered to the participants via e-mail. E-mail addresses of the institutions were obtained from the website of the Industrial Zone and also personal linkages were used in order to establish a connection with authorities. One respond was accepted from each participant institution. 190 replies gathered at the database. 155 of them accepted as valid and used for analyzes. Those 155 participants were visited physically in order to provide and guarantee healthy replying process. Data obtained from the surveys was used to perform various analyzes in order to test accuracy of the hypothesis by using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). There are many hypothesis based on dimensions of two variables or demographic data of the participants. The Thesis was mainly constituted on the claim of meaningful relation between transformational leadership and institutionalization and the results of the analyses demonstrate that transformational leadership has a considerable effect level (more than 50%) at institutionalization of companies. Key Words: Leadership, types of leadership, transformational leadership, institutionalization, dimensions of institutionalization.