Is the role attributed to value congruence in transformational leadership theory a case of missing the forest for the trees? An exploratory study

Value congruence between followers and leaders is considered to be a keystone of transformational leadership. However, we do not know whether congruence is important regardless of the content of values, of the leadership behavior assessed, and whether the patterns are stable across leaders. To address these gaps, we recruited a sample of 300 participants, representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, sex, and race, five days before the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Participants assessed their own values as well as the values and transformational leadership of two presidential candidates. We explored the relationships between variables through multiple specifications of polynomial regressions and lasso regressions. Our results do not suggest that value congruence is particularly importantly related to transformational leadership; however, they do point to an important contribution by perceived leader benevolence. Based on these results, we conclude that the focus on value congruence in the leadership literature might be a case of missing the forest for the trees.