<<Do you know if anyone has studied or hypothesized such a thing?>>
No, but my research was very brief and focused mostly on reviews and meta-analyses rather than looking at the primary studies. So a more thorough research project (or interviews with the authors of the reviews and meta-analyses?) might reveal this sort of thing better.
<<If not, do you have a sense from your research of what this might look like?>>
I’m not sure I’m quite following, but if you are asking what the control group looks like currently:
Usually the research is just correlational. So implicitly, it’s comparing high scores to low scores on the same scales.
Some training evaluations have used experimental or quasi-experimental designs, randomising participants to receive training or receive no training, I believe.
If you’re asking if I can imagine there being more targeted sorts of research that address your specific hypothesis (“any team which meets 1-3 will not have its performance improved by ‘transformational’ leadership etc”), I can certainly imagine it. E.g. you run a similar experiment across lots of different organisations, and beforehand, you assign the organisation some sort of score (subjective rankings out of 10?) for each of those variables and see whether there are correlations. But 1) this sounds like a very intensive research programme, 2) I don’t usually see social scientists and academics use subjective rankings as variables, perhaps because it seems less replicable by other researchers and less rigorous?
<<Do you know if anyone has studied or hypothesized such a thing?>>
No, but my research was very brief and focused mostly on reviews and meta-analyses rather than looking at the primary studies. So a more thorough research project (or interviews with the authors of the reviews and meta-analyses?) might reveal this sort of thing better.
<<If not, do you have a sense from your research of what this might look like?>>
I’m not sure I’m quite following, but if you are asking what the control group looks like currently:
Usually the research is just correlational. So implicitly, it’s comparing high scores to low scores on the same scales.
Some training evaluations have used experimental or quasi-experimental designs, randomising participants to receive training or receive no training, I believe.
If you’re asking if I can imagine there being more targeted sorts of research that address your specific hypothesis (“any team which meets 1-3 will not have its performance improved by ‘transformational’ leadership etc”), I can certainly imagine it. E.g. you run a similar experiment across lots of different organisations, and beforehand, you assign the organisation some sort of score (subjective rankings out of 10?) for each of those variables and see whether there are correlations. But 1) this sounds like a very intensive research programme, 2) I don’t usually see social scientists and academics use subjective rankings as variables, perhaps because it seems less replicable by other researchers and less rigorous?