The Relationship Between Transactional Leaders And Transformational Leaders

The three leadership practice of Dr. Cliff Roberts of Nebraska CHI delegated leadership, transformational leadership, and transactional leadership. Transformational leadership is a type of leadership where the leader does a lot of communication with the staff, they identify the change needed, create a plan to change through inspiration and executes the change while developing the follower into a leader. The leader is always generally energetic, enthusiastic and passion about their work. They are always inspiring positive changes into employees, focus on helping the staff succeed well, always challenging employees to take greater ownership in their work and understand the weakness and strength of each person and align each with the task that optimizes their performance.

The leader demonstrates to the followers loyalty, trust, respect and admiration, with these the qualities of the transformational leader, they tend to work harder than originally expected that tends to have a link between effort and reward. These outcomes occur because the transformational leader offers followers something more than just working for self-gain; they provide followers with an inspiring mission and vision and gives them an identity. They believe in the organizational culture they find and specific methods of performing tasks. Transactional leaders are effective in getting specific tasks completed by managing each portion individually. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, transactional leaders focus on the lower levels of the hierarchy that is the very basic levels of need satisfaction. One way that transactional leadership focuses on lower level needs is by stressing specific task performance (Hargis et al, 2001). They are more concerned with processes rather than revolutionary ideas hence under their leadership change is least expected. Unlike them, transformational leaders end up changing existing organizational cultures by implementing new ideas.

Over the past twenty years, an abundant body of researches have been done to review transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Burn (1978) was the first person to introduce and conceptualize the concept of transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Bass (1985) based on Burn’s concept and deepen his notion with modifications, which stated that one of the best frameworks of leadership is transformational or transactional, but not opposing to each other. Followed by Bass and Avolio (1994), they provide the idea of these two leaderships and generalize them into the development of global economic world. Bass and Avolio (1997) also suggested that there was no need to view transformational and

Organizational leadership builds on traditional theories in order to form new and exciting directions. Transactional leadership is a traditional theory, which has been used as a platform to understand leadership and further develop techniques for higher organizational performance. The three components of transactional leadership help shape and define the style, but are not always strictly adhered to. There are many advantages and disadvantages of transformational leadership. Knowing how and when to apply this style will prove useful for most successful organizational leaders. President Dwight Eisenhower was a good example of how transactional leadership could be used successfully.

As the study of leadership has expanded over the past decades, a general shift in the paradigm of leadership style has begun to occur. The male dominated workforce has started to give way to a far more diversified workplace, with increasing numbers of women and minorities in leadership positions. This shift, resultantly, is causing a move away from the traditional leadership styles, with more focus given to contemporary leadership theories. For example, in a recent TED Talk Roselinde Torres discussed the shortcomings of leadership styles that were effective twenty years ago, but are now proving to be lacking (Horvath, 2014). In her speech, Torres suggests that a transition away from traditional leadership styles could increase the performance and diversity of organizations. The divisive effects of this transition is significantly apparent in the American fire service, as the profession continues to move from a homogeneous workforce into a culture striving for diversity. As more women continue to rise into leadership roles within the fire service, the influence and impact of transactional versus transformational leadership contributes to the effectiveness of minority leaders. This paper will reflect on how this influence relates to the effectiveness of female leaders within the fire service.

Leaders can chose to use transformational leadership and transactional leadership independently or a combination of both to achieve defined

Additionally, transformational leadership theory looks at leadership differently. It sees a true leader as one who can distil the values, hopes, and needs of followers into a vision, and then encourage and empower followers to pursue that vision. A transactional leader thinks of improvement or development as doing the same thing better: an organization that reaches more people, a company that makes more money. A transformational leader thinks about changing the world, even if only on a small scale (Community Tool box, 2016).

Transformation leadership fixates on the group's mission and gets employees to see beyond their own needs and self-intrigues for the good of the group. In other words, this gets the group to work in unison instead of everyone only worrying about themselves. Unlike this leadership, transactional leadership is when followers are rewarded if they had a good performance or punished when they do a bad performance. One difference is that with transformational the group works as one; therefore, the companies' success is essentially also the followers success. This approach is efficient to improve the company's performance. On the other hand , transactional leadership is not as efficient, since it puts to much focus on threats and discipline that it does not improve performance. Furthermore, transformation has four components which include charismatic leadership, inspirational leadership, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. These components help followers to look up to the leaders as role models, to encourage creativity and motivation, and for leaders to pay attention toward the followers' individual needs. These components help the company be successful in the long run. On the other hand transactional does not work for the long run, it is better for short

Transactional leaders set clear roles for subordinates. They understand roles and responsibilities and are able to give clear direction to subordinates. Transactional leaders recognize their subordinates for their performance and appropriately reward them for achievements. Transactional leaders also have a concern for people. They care about creating an emotional balance. They get to know

Over the past twenty years, an abundant body of researches have been done to review transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Burn (1978) was the first person to introduce and conceptualize the concept of transformational leadership and transactional leadership. Bass (1985) based on Burn’s concept and deepened his notion with modifications, which stated that one of the best frameworks of leadership is transformational or transactional. Following Bass and Avolio (1994, p. 4) provided the idea of these two leaderships and generalized them into the development of global economic world. Bass and Avolio (1997) also suggested that there was no need to view transformational and transactional leadership as

leadership, it might be useful to look at his definitions. Burns wrote, “I define leadership as

Two main categories of leader exist in the workforce: transformational and transactional. Both have the ability to develop high levels of emotional intelligence and perhaps an emotionally intelligent super star will default to one leadership style over the other depending on the situation. Each style has its own characteristics but this however doesn’t mean that one is right or wrong or that they are completely unrelated. In actuality “This means a leader can be both transactional and transformational and that hat transformational leadership builds on transactional leadership” (Bryman, 1993, p. 459)

In order to catch up with the rapid changes in the business world, an organisation has to be able to manage change and implement change to sustain a competitive advantage over competitors. The leaders of an organisation plays a huge role in detecting changes and implementing changes to an organisation to improve the organisation’s overall performance. Leaders are people who have ‘the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of goals’ (Dran, 2004). Leadership is then categorised into transactional leadership and transformational leadership. The traditional view favoured transactional leadership where the leader is given the power to make all decisions and stated in early times what the reward will be (Burns, 1978). However, as the world changes, transformational leader is favoured now. Transformational leader recognises their followers’ needs and empowers them (Bass, 1990). Transformational leader influence and encourages their followers in a positive way and this leadership style is highly preferred for an organisation to become successful (Krishnan, 2002). The type of leadership would affect the organisation’s performance, especially the employee’s performances (Mohiuddin, 2017).

The primary focus of my research will deal with both transactional and authentic leadership and how they are viewed in the workplace. Transactional leadership is most often compared to transformational leadership. Transactional leadership depends on self-motivated people who work well in a structured, directed environment. By contrast, transformational leadership is used to motivate and inspire workers by influence rather than direct the individual. Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader's legitimacy through honest relationships with followers whose input are valued and are built linked to an ethical foundation. Authentic leaders are usually positive people with truthful

While the transactional leadership can be seen as simple contract trade based on the interest of greed, which sometimes get confused with what we call the manager’s task. The transformational leadership seeks to satisfy high need of its subordinates, commit to aspiring human dimension to a process of stimulation and mutual development in which the selfish interests are transcended in favor of the common good.