Linking leadership practices to performance of the US federal agencies

Purpose - The mechanism by which leadership influences organizational performance has largely been unexplained. This study intends to fill this gap. This study identified the six specific leadership practices: promoting inter-unit collaboration, managing diversity, providing performance feedback, ensuring goal directedness, developing employees, and resource provision. This study also identified a number of generic functions of leadership, that is, promoting cooperation, clarifying employees’ roles, and improving skills in organization. Then the mediating effects of the three generic functions were tested in order to link the specific leadership practices to organizational performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - Structural equation modeling was used for analyzing the data from the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to investigate the mediating model. Findings - The effects of the six specific leadership practices on organizational performance were mediated by the three generic leadership functions. Originality/value - The result of this study delineated the linking paths between leadership practices and organizational performance which has largely remained as a black box. Moreover, since the specific leadership practices are categorized by the generic functions that are instrumental for organizational performance, it provides theoretical and empirical grounds for managerial prescriptions for improving organizational performance.