Reference no: EM131804615
Are transactional leadership and transformational leadership mutually exclusive? (Clearly define your terms and support your position).
Answer 1. Kate
Transactional and Transformational leadership styles have attracted the interest of many researchers in recent time. While some believe that they are the same, others believe they are different. Transformational Leadership is a leadership perspective that explains how leaders change teams or organizations by creating, communicating, and modeling a vision for the organization or work unit, and inspiring employees to strive for that vision whereas transactional leadership is leadership that helps organizations achieve their current objectives more efficiently, such as linking job performance to valued rewards and ensuring that employees have the resources needed to get the job done.
Comparison between the two Leadership styles:
Transformational Leadership:
- Create a "vision" for the future
- Leadership is proactive
- Works to change the organisational culture by implementing new ideas
- Motivates followers by encouraging them to put group interests first
- Ability to see long-term results/achievements
- Leaders are risk-takers and encourage curiosity with their followers
- Leaders manipulate their power to get what they want and can be construed as self-centred
- Stimulates follower performance and innovation beyond their expectations
- Concerned with motivating and inspiring followers, i.e. unselfish
- Emphasises social exchange between leaders and followers
- Seeks to satisfy needs of their followers
- A high standard of followers are necessary and is key to leaders' success
- Based on trust, similar values and agreement between leaders and followers
- Women usually take on transformational leadership style due to their feminine characteristics of compassion, socially sensitive and friendly
Transactional Leadership
- Concerned with short-term goals
- Works within the organizationalculture
- Leader has full control
- Rewards and punishments are prevalent; follower always takes responsibility whether positive or negative
- "Economic exchange" for services
- Transactional leaders are aware of their followers' needs, whether that be monetary rewards or praise
- Structure and directives are commonplace and preferred by followers
- Leaders will continually monitor followers' performance; management by exception - active
- Leaders as a rule only interact with followers when problems arise; management by exception
Research has shown that transformational leaders may be more effective as they produce better results, get promoted more readily in addition to obtaining respect and loyalty from their followers. However, it should be noted that for transformational leaders to be successful and produce these better results, they almost entirely rely on high quality followers whose expertise will help achieve this. Therefore, an important aspect of transformational leadership would be to have the best possible followers working for them.
Answer 2. Debbie-ann
Are transactional leadership and transformational leadership mutually exclusive? (Clearly define your terms and support your position).
The approaches of transactional leadership vs transformational (also known as charismatic) leadership are often presented in a way that seem to suggest that there are very clear differences between the two leadership styles. It is stated that transactional leaders differ from transformational leaders in both structure and method. Transformational leadership emphasizes influencing a group or organization to make the world a better place. In transactional leadership however, the emphasis is on managing the performance of the individual and determining how well he or she performs in a structured environment.
Further, transactional refers to a "telling" leadership style, and transformational refers to a "selling" style. While the transactional approach features positive and negative reinforcement, transformational leadership emphasizes motivation and inspiration (Spahr, 2016).
While the above leadership styles seem very distinctive, it has been realized that the 'two-factor' transformational/transactional leadershiptheory oversimplifies the complexity of leadership (Yukl 1989). Conceptually, there are actually key similarities between the two styles, so they cannot be described as being mutually exclusive
A study done by Strange and Mumford's (2002) explored the overlap between transformational and transactional leadership. They found that ideological leaders (also known as transactional leaders) displayed the same charismatic behaviours that charismatic (or transformational) leaders did, leading them to specifically state that 'ideological leadership can be viewed as a subtype of charismatic leadership', a 'form ... where greater emphasis is placed on values and standards in vision formation than is typically the case for charismatic leaders' (Strange and Mumford 2002).
Researchers studying charismatic leadership have also long argued that values and ideology are also key aspects of charismatic leadership(Brown and Treviño 2009; House 1977; Howell and Shamir 2005). Charismatic leaders are argued to provide ideological explanations that are rooted in history (Shamir et al. 1993). While one can distinguish charismatic leaders who emphasize ideology in their visions from those who do not, and this distinction may be important, the value added by isolating these charismatic leadership behaviours and applying the new label of ideological leadership is not readily apparent (Anderson & Sun, 2015).
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