Leadership Case

Leadership

Introduction

In this essay, the concept of leadership has been explored and one of its types "transformational leadership" and its factors have been critically evaluated by comparing and contrasting the different views of various authors and researchers.

The first part of this essay is an introduction to the concept of leadership by definitions given by different authors.

The second part is discussion and comparison of different types of leadership; however the transformational leadership has been explained in more depth with the basic factors of the concept.

Finally the last part of this essay is a conclusion based on the literature review and discussion in previous sections.

What is Leadership?

Leadership has been widely used for literature and research for past many of years. Leadership has been defined in different ways by different authors; some of them are stated below.

Burns (1978) described leadership as

" a stream of evoking interrelationships in which leaders are continuously evoking motivational responses from followers and modifying their behaviour as they meet responsiveness or resistance, in a ceaseless process of flow and counter flow."

Richards & Engle (1986); Lohmann 1992; House and Aditya 1997; Bass 1997 also defined leadership as

"A process of building the vision, trust, value, commitment and working environment, as well as influencing activity to accomplish the organization's goals."

From above definitions there are central components of leadership are: Northouse.P (2004)

* Process

* Involves influence

* Occurs within a group context

* Involves goal attainment

Based on above components Northouse.P (2004) defined leadership as

"Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal."

So from above definitions leadership is two way communications or it is transactional experience that occurs between leader and his followers.

Transformational Leadership

"J.M.Burns (1978) conceptualized leadership as either transactional or transformational."

-Bass and Riggio (2006)

As it is mentioned leadership has been conceptualized in two models, transactional and transformational. Transformational leadership and its factors have been explored in this essay, but before that some brief explanation of transactional leadership and comparison of two has been discussed to understand the concept better.

J.M.Burns (1978) has stated transactional leadership as an exchange or trade between the followers and their leaders, which is also supported by Bass (1985) who has added the two primary factors as stated below:

* Contingent reward approach: it means followers get something in return from their leader in exchange of meeting the objectives or achieving the goals have been given by the leader.

* Management by exception: it means that there are some observable set of rules created by the leader to interfere if followers are making any mistakes in achieving their goals.

Where as transformational leadership has been defined by Burns (1978) as

"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."

We will discuss transformational leadership in more depth later but before that there is a comparison in two kinds of leaders based on leadership style they use.

Comparison

Burns (1978) and Bass (1985) have stated the following qualities that transformational leader should possess:

* Raising the awareness of followers about achieving moral and valued outcomes, vision and the required strategy

* Convincing followers to give priority team objectives or interests over their own interests.

* Expanding the needs of followers by raising their awareness about their goals.

And qualities of transactional leaders are: Burns (1978) and Bass (1985)

* Exchanges awards or promise of awards for efforts

* Try to understand individual needs and try to get work done in exchange of that.

So by above comparisons between two it can be concluded that transactional leadership is simply give and take but the transformational leadership is about working together to raise the values and moral to the higher level. Transactional leadership works with set of rules but transformational leadership is trying to explore new things to satisfy both

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