How Supportive Climates Turn Charismatic Leadership Into Employee Belonging

Why do some employees come to define themselves through their organization, while others see it as just a paycheck? A new study published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology offers one of the most precise answers to date, and it hinges on something deceptively simple: whether employees perceive their workplace as genuinely supportive. Researchers Athena Xenikou of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Alexandra Hantzi, and Sofia Koroni of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences examined how the separate components of transformational leadership shape workers’ sense of identification with their employer, and their findings reveal that a perceived climate of support is the critical psychological bridge.

Transformational leadership has long been one of the most studied constructs in organizational psychology. Leaders described this way communicate compelling visions, act as ethical role models, handle difficult situations effectively, transcend their own self-interest, and inspire followers to exceed expectations. Decades of meta-analytic research have confirmed that transformational leadership predicts positive work attitudes, organizational identification, and both task and contextual performance. Yet the construct has also attracted serious criticism. In an influential 2013 review, Van Knippenberg and Sitkin argued that charismatic-transformational leadership research often failed to clearly define the construct and frequently confounded leadership with its effects, calling for studies that disentangle the individual components of the theory and the distinct mechanisms through which each operates.

The new study answers that call with a granular approach. Rather than treating transformational leadership as a single undifferentiated bundle, the researchers separated it into three theoretically distinct components. Charisma combines idealized influence and inspirational motivation: followers perceive charismatic leaders as value-driven and are moved by their attractive visions of the future. Intellectual stimulation involves challenging assumptions and encouraging subordinates to think about problems in novel and useful ways. Individualized consideration captures the dyadic relationship between leader and follower, in which the leader actively cares for each person’s needs, goals, and personal growth. The question was whether each component feeds into employees’ identification with the organization through different psychological routes.

To map those routes, the team focused on psychological value climates, a concept defined as a psychologically meaningful description of the work environment held by an individual member rather than a shared property of the organization. The researchers drew on three core climate dimensions that decades of research have shown to describe organizations across industries and cultures: goal climates, involving achievement, clear objectives, performance indicators, and contingent reward; support climates, involving cooperation, teamwork, mutual trust, participation in decision making, and employee development; and innovation climates, involving openness to change, flexibility, creativity, and experimentation. Crucially, the authors measured climate at the individual level of perception, arguing that a member’s subjective reading of the work environment is a more powerful predictor of identification than commonly shared perceptions aggregated across the group.

Their sample consisted of 353 full-time employees nested within 30 management units of a large Greek public organization in the security industry. The participants, most of them male and roughly half of them middle or upper-level managers, completed well-validated questionnaires assessing the transformational leadership dimensions of their immediate supervisors, their psychological value climates, and their identification with the employing organization. Organizational identification itself was measured with a scale capturing both cognitive and affective components, from feeling similar to other members to emotional commitment to belonging. The researchers analyzed the nested data using multilevel structural equation modeling, which accounts for the statistical dependency among employees working in the same units, and verified through confirmatory factor analyses that all seven study constructs were empirically distinct rather than artifacts of a single measurement method.

The pattern of associations that emerged was strikingly differentiated. Charisma was positively related to all three psychological climates, predicting perceptions of goal, support, and innovation values in the work environment. Intellectual stimulation was associated with innovation climate, confirming its theoretical link to creativity, cognitive flexibility, and openness to change. Individualized consideration predicted both support and goal climates, reflecting how attentive, individualized leader-follower relationships build perceptions of cooperation and achievement. These findings support the central theoretical claim that transformational leaders exert influence precisely by communicating and embodying organizational values, with each leadership component coloring a distinct slice of the psychological landscape.

The mediation analyses then delivered the study’s most consequential result. Only support psychological climate served as a significant explanatory mechanism linking leadership to identification. For charisma, the indirect path through support climate was statistically significant, with a Monte Carlo confidence interval based on 20,000 replications excluding zero, and because charisma retained a direct positive relationship with identification, the mediation was partial: charismatic leaders both directly attract identification and indirectly foster it by cultivating a climate of trust, collaboration, and mutual support. For individualized consideration, the effect was even more complete. The entire relationship between individualized consideration and organizational identification flowed through support psychological climate, meaning that leaders who attend to followers’ individual needs and strengths bond employees to the organization specifically by making the workplace feel supportive. Mediation hypotheses involving goal and innovation climates were tested and rejected, sharpening the conclusion that support is the operative channel.

The authors interpret these results through the lens of the social identity approach, which holds that leaders influence followers by making a shared social identity salient, satisfying two fundamental motives: uncertainty reduction and self-enhancement. Charismatic behaviors that communicate values of cooperation, participation, and self-actualization instill confidence that the group can work together toward common goals, which fulfills both motives and encourages members to fold the organization into their self-concept. For individualized consideration, social exchange theory offers a complementary account: high-quality leader-member relationships trigger the norm of reciprocity, so employees treated well return the favor with positive attitudes, and the availability of supportive resources itself acts as identity-relevant information that deepens identification.

The study also speaks to a long-running debate about the dark side of charismatic leadership. Critics have warned that charismatic leaders can emotionally engage followers in the pursuit of goals contrary to their own interests. The Greek data suggest a more reassuring picture, at least for the charisma measured by the widely used Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire: this dimension promoted a climate of mutual trust, collaboration, and positive interpersonal relations, which the authors read as evidence that charisma, properly operationalized, to some extent reflects the moral and ethical core of authentic transformational leadership rather than manipulative influence.

Of course, the correlational design cannot establish causal direction, and the single-source, self-report nature of the data leaves room for future work using experimental, longitudinal, and multi-source designs, including assessments of employees’ identification by close colleagues or supervisors. Still, the practical implications are clear and actionable. Organizations seeking to deepen employees’ sense of belonging should focus leadership development on the behaviors the study found most consequential: handling difficult situations effectively, modeling ethical standards, articulating an attractive collective vision, and attending to each individual’s needs, aspirations, and strengths. Interventions that promote positive social relations at work, helping behavior, cooperation in solving problems, and personal and professional development appear to be the solid ground on which employee engagement and identification are built. In an era when organizations compete fiercely for commitment, the message from this research is that support is not a soft perk but the psychological mechanism through which leadership translates into genuine loyalty.

Subject of Research: The mediating role of psychological value climates in the relationship between transformational leadership components and organizational identification

Article Title: Psychological value climates as mediators in the relation between follower-perceived transformational leadership and organizational identification

Article References: Psychological value climates as mediators in the relation between follower-perceived transformational leadership and organizational identification. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/forgp.2026.1776476

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/forgp.2026.1776476

Keywords: transformational leadership, charisma, organizational identification, psychological climate, support climate, individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, organizational values, social identity, multilevel structural equation modeling, employee engagement, workplace psychology