General Introduction Transformational leadership theory is one of the most important leadership theories in organizational psychology (cf. Lowe & Gardner, 2000), and it has been shown that 'it predicts a wide range of individual and organizational outcomes. in a wide range of contexts, including military (Bass, Avolio, Jung & Berson, 2003; Dvir, Eden, Avolio & Shamir, 2002; Hardy et al, 2010), commercial (Barling, Weber & Kelloway, 1996; Judge & Piccolo , 2004; Kelloway, Turner, Barling and Loughlin, 2012), sport (Arthur, woodman, Ong, Hardy and Ntoumanis, 2012; Callow, Smith, Hardy and Arthur, 2009) and education (Chin, 2007; Leithwood et Sun, 2012). ; Mawn et al., 2014). The outcomes associated with transformational leadership are as broad as organizational commitment and financial performance in the business context, follower development and recruit performance in the military, team cohesion and performance in sports (Callow et al, 2009) and student engagement in education (Leithwood and Jantzi, 1999). As demonstrated by its broad application to a variety of contexts and domains, transformational leadership provides a useful and applicable leadership model in the practice which continues to be introduced into new and increasingly diverse areas of research. In this study, we will explore the utility of transformational leadership in the context of undergraduate research supervision. The quality of research supervision is widely considered to be a critically important factor in the student's experience of the research process (Howitt et al, 2010; Gold et al. , 2000). At the doctoral level, the quality of research supervision reported by students is related to doctoral completion/attrition rate, satisfaction with the research process, and time to completion (Ives et ...... middle of article ...... leadership theories such as transformational leadership Amid calls for more integrative research efforts in the areas of transformational leadership, leader member exchange. and the satisfaction of basic needs (Graves & Lucian, 2013; Wang et al, 2005; Kovjanic, 2013), we propose that the two foundations The mechanisms of transformational leader effectiveness described above are closely linked. sequential mediation is proposed by which transformational leadership facilitates the development of high-quality LMX relationships (Deluga 1992; Howell and Hall-Merenda, 1999; Wang et al., 2005), which then fosters an environment that facilitates employee satisfaction. follower's basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Graves & Luciano, 2013), which in turn positively impacts key follower outcomes such as engagement and performance (Kovjanic, 2013).