Can transformational leadership tackle the ‘Perfect Storm’ of growing employee diversity, environmental uncertainty and organizational change?

Organisations worldwide are faced with growing a) cultural and demographic employee diversity resulting from decades of inbound immigration and affirmative policies, b) environmental uncertainty due to recent global financial crisis and economic slowdown, and c) shortage of managerial knowledge and skills to manage the rapid pace of organisational change. We call the confluence of these critical issues a ‘Perfect Storm’ that poses a unique managerial challenge. In this research, we develop a conceptual model with the ingredients of this perfect storm and develop specific hypotheses about their inter-relationships. We propose to test these hypotheses with the publicly available data from Australian Public Service Commission’s (APSC) State of the Service Census data by mapping the variables in our model to the measures included in the APS State of the Service Census questionnaire, as briefly described in this paper.