Tamirat Leulseged Abera, Assefa Tsegay Tensay, Gedif Tessema Sinshaw
While leadership in projects, programs, and portfolios has received increasing attention, empirical evidence on how transformational leadership influences the success of government-implemented international development (ID) programs remains limited. This mixed-methods study combining CB-SEM with qualitative inquiry in a convergent parallel design examines the effect of transformational leadership on international development program success, with team-building practice as a mediator. Drawing on 228 surveys and 21 interviews from Ethiopia’s Urban Institutional and Infrastructure Development Program (UIIDP) implemented amid civil conflict, COVID-19, and economic inflation, results confirm four significant associations: transformational leadership with program success (β = 0.370, p < 0.001); transformational leadership with team-building practice (β = 0.662, p < 0.001); team-building practice with program success (β = 0.359, p < 0.001); and partial mediation through team-building (indirect β = 0.180), accounting for 50.1% of the total effect. Extending from NGO projects to government-implemented programs, the study advances three theoretically distinct propositions: program success is reconceptualized as institutional capacity building and strategic benefits realization; bureaucratic attenuation, a post hoc interpretive proposition, suggests government structures may dampen leadership’s translation into program outcomes; cultural and compound crisis conditions extend cross-cultural and crisis leadership theory to program contexts. Qualitative evidence is consistent with psychological ownership as a plausible compensatory mechanism where extrinsic rewards are constrained. Contributions include multilevel theorization that distinguishes program from project leadership, four team-building mediation pathways proposed for future testing, and a validated blended program success measure that integrates academic and practitioner indicators.