TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

The leadership has been an important topic for historians and philosophers for the thousands years. The famous Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato wrote about characteristics and requirements of leadership between 400-300 BC. However, the scientific studies have begun in 20th century because of industrial revolutions, rise of the capitalism and polarization of countries. According to Johnson (2002), it was Max Weber who was the first who started to study leadership discriminatingly and James MacGregor Burns elaborated the differences between ordinary (transactional) leadership and extraordinary (transformational) leadership (Barnett et al., 2001). Bass and Avolio used the concept provided by Burns and developed full range model leadership model which contains components of leadership behaviours from non-leader to transactional leader and from transactional leader to transformational leader. (Bass and Avolio, 1994) The theory of transactional leadership and transformational leadership with its four components, criticisms and arguments against transformational leadership and the outweighing advantages and importance of the transformational leadership are described within that essay with examples and case studies.

Transactional leadership is the fourth step named contingent reward (CR) in Bass’s full range of leadership model. According to Kirkbride (2006), a transactional leader sets very clear goals for his/her followers and explains the rewards of achieving specified goals either directly or implicitly. The rewards can be monetary but mostly they refer to non-financial rewards like physical ones such as extra holiday, flexible work, time/day off or like nonphysical rewards such as compliments, admiration, visibility and recognition. The transactional leader also monitors performance of his/her followers and rewards them. When this style of leadership is performed, a certain level of performance and success can be attained but to make followers walk the extra mile, it is required to use transformational styles of leadership. A research done by Tu and Lu (2016) proves that the followers go the extra mile when they are intrinsically motivated and being instilled confidence by their transformational leaders.

The term “transformational leadership” was mentioned firstly by James V. Downton in 1973. After that, Burns (1978, p.20) stated that “transformational leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality”. Then, Bass (1990, p.21) developed Burns’ description as “transformational leadership occurs when leaders broaden and elevate the interests of their employees, when they generate awareness and accept rice of the purposes and mission of the group, and when they stir their employees to look beyond their own self-interest for the good of the group.” According to Bass (1990) the transformational leaders achieve these results by being charismatic to their followers and inspiring them, meeting the emotional needs of each follower, stimulating followers intellectually. Finally, Bass and Avolio (1994) introduced full range of leadership model with transformational leadership and its 4I components: individualized consideration (IC), intellectual stimulation (IS), inspirational motivation (IM) and idealized influence (II).

Individualized Consideration: The transformational leaders are more solicitous about their followers’ needs and desires and they try to understand capacities and characters of their followers and develop their potentials by acting as a coach or mentor. The leader sees his/her followers as a whole person rather than as just an employee and creates an efficient individual communication with his/her follower. (Bass and Riggio, 2006)

Intellectual Stimulation: The transformational leaders stimulate their followers to become more creative and innovative by thinking critically, examining assumptions and finding new solutions to old situations and they encourage their followers to produce new ideas, address problems and find solutions. The leader makes their followers to look at problems from different angles and let them to give their voice easily.

Inspirational Motivation: The transformational leaders motivate and inspire their followers by appreciating their works and focus on team spirit to create enthusiasm and optimism in their organizations. The leader creates a company or an organization vision by involving their followers’ expectations and demonstrate commitment to goals and articulates a compelling vision of the future.

Idealized Influence: The transformational leaders make their selves a role model for their followers which makes them more appreciated, admired, respected and trusted by his/her followers. The leader is considered to have extraordinary capabilities, more strength, stability, determination, charisma and he/she emphasise the importance of togetherness and gives confidence to followers that obstacles will be overcome together. (Bass and Riggio, 2006)

According to the results of Bass’s multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ), transformational leaders are more likely to seen by their colleagues and employees as satisfying and effective than transactional leaders (Bass and Avolio, 1994). Also Bass (1990) state that transformational leaders have better relationships with their followers which makes them to contribute more to the organization than followers working under transactional leaders. Moreover, employees say that they exert a lot of effort on behalf of their leaders who are transformational leaders.

Even though transformational leadership have many advantages over transactional leadership, there are many criticisms and arguments against transformational leadership. Idealized influence is one of the most criticized components of transformational leadership because some of transformational leaders with high charisma may misuse their power and privilege and they may start to neglect supporting their followers. According to Yukl (2013, p.319) there may be some negative consequences of charismatic leaders like reduction in good suggestions and criticisms by followers, increase in excessive confidence and optimism by leader, stepdown in development of competent successors, denial of problems and failures by leader, decrease in capacity to foresee possible dangers and future expectations.

According to Nye (2008), “Transformational leaders can inspire and unite followers, but effectiveness and ethics can suffer.” The morality of leaders may be a bottleneck for transformational leadership because leaders have a potential for the abuse of the power (Hall et al., 2002). Transformational leaders create a strong emotional connection with their followers which results in a powerful influence on them. The leaders with narcissistic tendencies may misuse their power that can be resulted in manipulation. The danger starts when followers start to ignore such manipulations because of the strong emotions and bonds to their leaders (Stone et al., 2004). According to Bass and Steidlmeier (1999), the transformational leadership does not have any auto control system to avoid dictatorship. When the leader lacks of moral values, undesirable results can be showed up. Homrig (2011) demonstrates transformational leadership as a sharp but double-edged sword and states that “pseudo transformational leadership has a potential immoral and unethical dimension that could be exploited by an unscrupulous leader inflicted on naive and unsuspecting followers.” For example, Hitler captured the hearts of German people by his charisma and transcendent vision however his insatiable greed for power and immoral, paranoid character made Germany collapse along with death of millions of innocent people. Another dark transformational leader was Jim Jones who was founder of People’s Temple in USA. He was charismatic and had a lofty goal but he eventually caused to suicide of over 800 followers in 1978. (Homrig, 2011)

Dark and destructive transformational leadership can be demonstrated also in the business sector also. Enron was a company with revenues more 100 billion dollars and selected as America’s most innovative company by Fortune. They were an energy giant and their shares reached high of 90 $ in the beginning of 2000 and then decreased to 1 $ only in one year and went to bankrupt in 2001. The reason of this collapse was immorality of board of directors. They hide their debts by poor and wrong financial reports and using accounting loopholes and also they sold their shares from highest price without informing their employees and other shareholders (Writers, 2011). Enron’s impressive collapse was followed by the implosion of WorldCom which was one of USA’s leader company in telecommunications industry. CEO Bernard Ebbers used fraudulent accounting methods to make their investors think that situation of company was good and healthy. The underreporting of costs resulted in 3.8 billion dollars in fraud and ended with the company’s bankruptcy. (Writers, 2011)

These criticisms about the morality of transformational leadership have been addressed by the argument that to be truly transformational, leadership must have moral foundations which is supported by Bass and Steidlmeier (1999, p.192) “to bring about change, authentic transformational leadership fosters the modal values of honesty, loyalty and fairness, as well as the end values of justice, equality and human rights.” Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King who were very charismatic and moral that can be given as examples of real transformational leaders.

In short; the aversive, dark, derailed, insincere, negative, pseudo or toxic transformational leaders can be seen as destructive leaders who have charisma and personalized power and with a narcist character but also who had negative life experience resulted in ideology of hate. But also susceptible followers and conducive environment are needed to transform a leader to destructive leader. But dark sides of transformational leadership can be prevented by proper leader selection and development, follower strengthening and empowerment and organizational improvement. (Padilla et al., 2007)

After giving prescription to prevent dark and negative sides transformational leadership by Padilla et al. (2007), the outweighing advantages can be explained to prove the importance of the transformational leadership by theory, researches and success stories. According to Bass and Riggio (2006, p.viii), “transformational leadership provides a better fit for leading today’s complex work groups and organizations where followers not only seek an inspirational leader to help guide them through and uncertain environment but where followers also want to be challenged and to feel empowered, if they are to be loyal, high performers.” Also transformational leaders skilfully shepherd the process of change around initiatives and increase the learning capacity of their organizations. In turn, organizations possess the unique ability to sustain and nurture change initiatives. (Allison-Napolitano, 2013) A research performed by Garcia-Morales et al. (2008) states that transformational leadership helps to develop a foundation of organizational knowledge in the organization and helps to improve organizational performance by allowing organizations to transfer knowledge better other firms. According to Malik (2016), the strong vision of an influential transformational leader can lead to the reinvention of the culture of the organization and improved productivity easily. A transformational leader can boost the company’s performance and increase the profitability by extraordinary changes in a company’s direction.

In the business sector, transformational leadership makes a success of difficult situations. For example, David Ossip, CEO of Ceridian, inherited a highly disengaged workforce and declining business results. Ossip’s first executive meeting come to one key understanding that Ceridian could not drive the other required changes without high employee engagement. Employee engagement had to become the core focus of organization. Eventually, Ossip’s transformational style saved Ceridian (Efron, 2016). Also, Lee Iaccoca took over the head of the Chrysler Corporation when it was in a time of distress. Even though Chrysler was a large corporation, he transformed the ideals of his closest subordinates and reshaped the corporate culture. Because a transformational leader encourages others to become transformational leaders, eventually the company is filled with effective transformational leaders at all levels. (National Research Council, 1997)

In conclusion, in today’s world, the companies and organizations that are managed by transformational leaders are more successful than others (Joyce, 1999). But, strong ethical guidelines remain very important to every organization. Most of the criticisms about transformational leadership are about ethics and moral values of leaders which may result in abuse of power and undesirable consequences. The quality and performance of transformational leadership can be improved by integrating morality to all human beings to reveal more ethical leaders, developing and empowering followers, improving structure and culture of organizations. All these actions will eliminate criticisms by time and lead to great transformational leaders.

Reference List:

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