RES 6561 Module 2 Framework Revisited Example

Does the Model Still Hold? Revisiting Transformational Leadership Theory and Psychological Safety After the Results Are In

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6561: Interpreting the Dissertation Research

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

Chapter 2 built the study on two ideas: that transformational leaders inspire and develop followers in ways that go beyond exchange of rewards for effort, and that people speak up at work when they believe interpersonal risk is safe. Joined together, those ideas predicted that transformational leadership would foster psychological safety, which in turn would foster voice. A framework section in Chapter 5 has a different job from the one in Chapter 2. It asks how well the theory explained the results, where it fell short and what the findings suggest about how it should change. This paper drafts that section.

The Framework as Proposed

Transformational leadership, as Bass and Riggio (2006) described it, includes four kinds of behavior: serving as a role model followers trust, communicating an inspiring vision, stimulating followers to question assumptions and attending to each follower's needs and development. Psychological safety, in Edmondson's account, is a belief, held in common by members, that the team will not punish someone for an interpersonal risk like owning up to an error or challenging a decision (Edmondson, 1999). Kahn (1990) had earlier identified safety as one of three psychological conditions under which people bring their full selves to work. The framework proposed three links: leadership to safety, safety to voice and, through safety, leadership to voice. The global leadership measure used in the study summarizes all four behaviors in one score.

What the Results Support

All three proposed links were supported. Leadership was strongly related to safety, safety was related to voice when leadership was held constant and the indirect path accounted for most of the leadership-voice association. The framework's core claim, that leaders influence speaking up largely by changing how safe it feels to speak, fits the data well. The fit is notable because the setting differs from those in which the theory was developed. Bass's work grew out of military and corporate leadership, and Edmondson's out of manufacturing and clinical teams. Revenue cycle staff work individual account queues, often remotely, and still reported the pattern the theory predicts. The theory therefore appears to travel to administrative health care work without modification of its basic structure.

Where the Framework Explained Less

The framework explained less in three places. First, the model accounted for about 22% of the variance in voice, leaving most of it unexplained. The theory says nothing about other reasons employees speak up or stay quiet, such as whether they believe speaking will change anything. Morrison (2014) argued that voice depends on two judgments, safety and efficacy, and the study measured only the first. Second, the framework treated transformational leadership as a single influence, yet its four behaviors may not work equally. Detert and Burris (2007) found that a manager's openness to input, a behavior close to individualized consideration, was a stronger route to voice than transformational leadership as a whole. The study's global measure cannot show which behaviors carried the effect. Third, the framework did not anticipate the role differences in leadership ratings, which suggest that status within a team may shape both how leaders are seen and how safe people feel (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006).

Testing the Framework's Boundaries

One way to judge a framework is to ask where it should fail. If the leadership-safety-voice path were simply an artifact of people who like their supervisors rating everything positively, the indirect effect should shrink when variables that capture general satisfaction are held constant, and safety should relate to voice no more strongly than leadership does. Neither pattern appeared: safety related to voice more strongly than leadership did, and the indirect path survived added controls for system and role. A second boundary concerns remote work. Kahn (1990) described safety as arising partly from interpersonal relationships, which distance might weaken; if the framework depended on daily face-to-face contact, the pathway should have been weaker for remote and hybrid staff. Work location did not change the estimates, though the study did not formally test whether the indirect path differed by location. That moderated test is a natural next step and would show whether the theory holds equally when supervisors and staff rarely share a room.

A Level-of-Analysis Problem

A conceptual mismatch deserves direct acknowledgment. Edmondson defined psychological safety as a team-level belief, shared by members, yet the study measured it as each employee's perception and analyzed it at the individual level. Employees were also nested within supervisors and teams, and the analysis did not model that nesting. The individual-level interpretation is still meaningful, since a person's own sense of safety plausibly shapes that person's willingness to speak, and meta-analytic work has examined psychological safety at both individual and group levels (Frazier et al., 2017). But the results speak to individual perceptions of safety, not to team climate as Edmondson conceived it. A study that collected enough responses per team to aggregate safety scores would test the framework as originally stated.

A Revised Model

The findings suggest a revised model for future work. It would keep the core path from leader behavior through psychological safety to voice, but replace the global leadership score with specific behaviors, at least separating leader openness and individualized consideration from inspirational and visionary behaviors. It would add voice efficacy, the belief that speaking up will lead to action, as a second mediator alongside safety, following the two-judgment account Morrison (2014) proposed. It would treat safety at both the individual and team level. And it would separate voice that offers suggestions from voice that raises concerns about problems, since a meta-analysis found that these forms have partly different antecedents (Chamberlin et al., 2017), and the scale used here mainly captured suggestions. In revenue cycle work, concerns about errors, payer behavior or compliance risks may matter most, and their link to safety could be stronger than the one observed.

Contribution to Theory

The study's contribution to theory is modest but real. It confirms that the leadership-safety-voice pathway holds in a setting outside the clinical, manufacturing and service contexts where it was established, including among remote and hybrid workers, a group the original theories did not consider. It also suggests that in work organized around individually assigned and measured tasks, the visibility of errors to a supervisor may heighten the role of leadership in shaping safety. That proposition was not tested directly and is offered as a hypothesis for future research rather than a finding. A second, smaller contribution is methodological: the study shows that the pathway can be examined with short, freely available scales in a single brief survey, which makes replication in other administrative settings practical.

Conclusion

The framework's central claim was supported and appears to hold in hospital revenue cycle work. It left much of voice unexplained, could not show which leadership behaviors mattered and was tested at the individual level although its key construct is defined at the team level. A revised model would separate leader behaviors, add voice efficacy, model team-level safety and distinguish suggestions from concerns. Module 3 states the study's limitations.

References

Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chamberlin, M., Newton, D. W., & LePine, J. A. (2017). A meta-analysis of voice and its promotive and prohibitive forms: Identification of key associations, distinctions, and future research directions. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 11-71. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12185

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113-165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

Kahn, W. A. (1990). Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of Management Journal, 33(4), 692-724. https://doi.org/10.2307/256287

Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173-197. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328

Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2006). Making it safe: The effects of leader inclusiveness and professional status on psychological safety and improvement efforts in health care teams. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(7), 941-966. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.413