From Purpose to Commitment: The Role of Transformational Leadership in a Nonprofit Organization

Abstract

The Make-A-Wish Foundation is a global nonprofit organization that grants life-changing wishes to children with critical illnesses. This study aimed to understand how leaders at Make-A-Wish Mid-South understood, practiced, and behaved in their roles, to provide strategies to further leadership development initiatives. We drew on James Burns’ (1978) theory of transformational leadership, which was further defined by Bernard Bass (1985), and Peng et al.’s (2020) moderated mediation model of transformational leadership and affective commitment to inform our project questions and conceptual framework. To answer our project questions, we asked employees to voluntarily participate in an online quantitative survey and qualitative interview. A review of quantitative survey and qualitative interview responses confirmed that centralization moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and affective commitment.