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Leadership

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For every theory there is a counter argument. What are the criticisms and arguments against Transformational Leadership? Identify the sources and clearly articulate the reasoning behind the criticisms. Adopt a position for or against Transformational Leadership and defend your position with argument Introduction This essay is based on the Transformational leadership theory and will be referred to as TL throughout this essay. This essay will look into criticisms and arguments against the theory and analyse the reasoning of these criticisms and arguments. Effective leaders are well aware that in best practice it is never viable to implement one style of leadership and flexibility is vital for a smooth operation. This essay will …show more content…

An inauthentic leader such as Adolf Hitler can create the same belief and faith to take a whole nation down a path of destruction. Bass and Riggio (2006) “Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Osama Bin Laden. These leaders are those who can be called Pseudotransformational” (pg5). There is no way TL can brush this off as it is part and parcel of any leadership theory that involves charismatic traits. Bass and Riggio (2006) “this notion of morally good and evil leaders has also been a dilemma for charismatic leadership theories”(pg13). Then the flaw of expected altruism within TL is raised by critics. Even though the theory highlights its pseudotransformational elements it does not give the follower enough information on how to recognise whether their leader is authentic or inauthentic. In a situation where the followers may lack education and live in impoverished conditions, an inauthentic leader will be able to manipulate these followers for an exploitative agenda. In this scenario, even with the frameworks such as FRL and MLQ (discussed later), the comprehension of these frameworks by followers will be fragmented. Gill, R (2009) “Studies have also mostly focused on the leader in relation to a group of followers, involving averaging their assessments of the leader, thus failing to account for differences that reflect different behaviours by leaders towards different individuals” (pg45).The theory concentrates a lot more of how it

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