The Relationship Between “Goal Difficulty and Transformational Leadership” and “Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Affective Commitment”

This research was carried out with the purpose of studying the moderating role of goal difficulty in the relation between transformational leadership and “organizational citizenship behaviors and affective commitment”. Statistical population was the personnel of Holding of Ehya Sepahan Mines and Industries Complex. Among them, 329 persons were selected using two stage sampling. Research instruments were: transformational leadership questionnaire with 22 items (including four subscales, named group goals, personal support, intellectual role model and high performance expectancies), affective commitment questionnaire with 8 items, organizational citizenship behaviors questionnaire with 9 items and goal difficulty questionnaire with 4 items. Data were analyzed using Pearson's correlation and moderated hierarchical regression analysis (in this analysis, transformational leadership dimensions were the predictive variables, goal difficulty was the moderator variable and organizational citizenship behaviors along with affective commitment were the criterion variables). Results showed that goal difficulty moderates the relationships of two dimensions of transformational leadership i.e. personal support and high performance expectancies and “organizational citizenship behaviors”. But in the relationship between transformational leadership dimensions and affective commitment, goal difficulty only moderates the relation between personal support and affective commitment. The above mentioned moderations mean that in low and high goal difficulty groups, there is a difference in relation between mentioned transformational leadership dimensions and “organizational citizenship behaviors and affective commitment”.