Perception and Reality: An Empirical Assessment of Navy Leadership Styles and Business Process Reengineering Outcomes
Seeking to improve mission readiness and organizational effectiveness while reducing expenditures, the Department of the Navy (DoN) eliminated and reconstructed many of its business practices. Reconstruction of the military's business practices was accomplished through business process reengineering (BPR). Business process reengineering is a change strategy that provides organizations the opportunity to do “more with less.” Although doing more with less is not a new concept in military settings, the organizational change construct of business process reengineering is new. Most organizations in the private sector that attempt reengineering do not attain their intended results; the literature reveals that 50–70% of organizations that undertake a reengineering effort fall short of their objectives. BPR's high failure rate in the private sector makes an organizational change process of this type, in a military setting, an important topic for study. It seemed especially important to investigate what relationship, if any, exists between perceived leadership behaviors and business reengineering process outcomes in a Department of Defense environment. This study explored this relationship. In particular, it examined the relationship between perceived leadership styles (as measured by the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ)), as well as measures of employee satisfaction, employee effort, employee effectiveness, and organizational effectiveness. (The first three of these variables were measured by additional items on the MLQ; organizational effectiveness was assessed through the use of additional items developed by the researcher based on Mott's index.) The study also related MLQ leadership style ratings with actual goal attainment; goal attainment data were gathered from DoN reports. Linear regression was the principle analytical tool employed. Results indicate that relationships exist between followers' perception of their supervisors' leadership styles, on the one hand, and perceptions of employee satisfaction, employee effort, employee effectiveness, and organizational effectiveness, on the other. More specifically, the data suggest that there is a positive relationship between transformational leadership and the variables listed above. No relationship, however, was detected when actual goal attainment was used as the dependent variable. The dissertation considers various possible explanations for this apparent anomaly. This study should be useful to the Department of the Navy, the business community and academics interested in BPR. This research provides information about an under-investigated topic: the role of leadership in BPR goal attainment.
Business process reengineering, empirical assessment, Leadership studies, Navy leadership styles, organizational change, perception, transformational leadership, United States Navy
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