Measures

The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass and Avolio 1995) 45-item form 5× was used to assess providers’ perceptions of the supervisors’ transformational leadership behaviors. Transformational leadership is comprised of the following four subscales: idealized influence (8 items, α = 0.87), inspirational motivation (four items, α = 0.91), intellectual stimulation (four items, α = 0.90), and individual consideration, (four items, α = 0.90). Our analyses focused on overall transformational leadership (20 items, α = 0.95).

The Children’s Services Survey (Glisson and James 2002) was used to assess organizational culture. The CSS has established excellent psychometric characteristics, and subscales are associated with work attitudes, staff turnover, and service quality in human service organizations (Glisson and James 2002). The organizational culture subscales were adapted for use in mental health services (Cooke and Rousseau 1988; Farmer et al. 2002; Glisson and James 2002). The subscales used in the current study assessed defensive culture including sub-scales of consensus (nine items, α = 0.85), conformity (seven items, α = 0.82) and subservience (four items, α = 0.82).