How Leadership Style develops Follower’s Regulatory Focus (Empirical Study from Rural Leaders at Banyumas Regency)

Achmad Sudjadi, Dwita Darmawati

Abstract


There are many ways how leaders influence their follower to attain the goals. The leadership
process may be effective when there is a consistency between leader and followers focus. This
study integrates Bass‘s Leadership Theory (1985) and Higgin‘s Regulatory Focus (1997). Higgins
proposes two ways how people to attains the goal, namely promotion focus that regulates
achievement of gains, and prevention focus that regulates the losses avoidance. Bass classifies
leader behaviour into three, that is transformational characterised by behaviors that challenge and
motivate followers to achieve desirable goals, communicate value-laden visions of ideal future
states, encouraging accomplishment, and express support for change, activation positive emotions;
transactional involves creating exchange-based transactions with followers; and laissez-faire or no
leadership.
We predict that transformational leadership correlates with follower‘s promotion focus,
transactional leadership correlates with prevention focus of the followers, and laissez-faire
leadership negatively correlates both promotion focus and prevention focus.
The sample of this study is 261 rural staff at Rural Offices in Banyumas Regency. The study
concludes that laissez-faire rural leaders reduce both promotion and prevention of their followers.
Although the data show that transformational and transactional leadership styles were applied, but
they are not supported by the data.
Keywords: Transformational; transactional; laissez-faire; promotion-prevention focus; and rural
leadership.


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