Transformational and transactional leadership across ADKAR change stages in Lebanese SMEs

Despite the widespread adoption of change management frameworks, organizational transformation initiatives continue to experience high failure rates, often due to misalignment between leadership behaviors and employees’ psychological transitions throughout the change process. This study examines the relationships between transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and the five dimensions of the ADKAR change model—Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement—in Lebanese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) undergoing organizational change. Using a quantitative cross-sectional survey design, data were collected from 385 employees and analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed relationships. The findings indicate that transformational leadership has a strong positive association with ADKAR-based change adoption, whereas transactional leadership also showed a significant but comparatively weaker association. Transformational leadership explained 43% of the variance in ADKAR outcomes, while transactional leadership accounted for 8.4%. When both leadership styles were included simultaneously, the model explained 47% of the variance, suggesting that transactional leadership provides a modest yet meaningful incremental contribution beyond transformational leadership alone. The results further reveal a stage-sensitive pattern, whereby transformational leadership is more strongly associated with the early cognitive and motivational stages of change, including awareness and desire, while transactional leadership is more closely linked to implementation-focused stages involving ability and reinforcement. These findings suggest that change leadership effectiveness may be enhanced by aligning leadership behaviors with the evolving requirements of each ADKAR stage, emphasizing inspiration, vision, and individualized support during the early phases and structured performance management during implementation and reinforcement. This study contributes to the change leadership literature by extending the application of Full-Range Leadership Theory through a stage-sensitive examination of transformational and transactional leadership across the ADKAR dimensions in Lebanese SMEs.