Transactional Leadership

Transactional Leadership and Organizational Change:

Literature on leadership shows a progressive model, which starts from focusing on the traits and characteristics of a leader, then focuses on behavior and afterward highlights on the contextualized nature of the leadership. The concept of leadership starts with the unique focus on the theory of “Great Man”. The supporter of the great man theory assumes that leaders are born and have innate qualities; therefore, leaders cannot be made. The word “Man” was intentionally used to indicate the role of males only.

Early research on leadership further focused on the common characteristics that discriminate leaders from followers. The emphasized philosophy pertained, if anyone has traits such as

transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership is centered on leader follower exchanges. Followers perform according to the will and direction of the leaders and leaders positively reward the efforts. The baseline is reward, which can be negative like punitive action, if followers fail to comply with or it can be positive like praise and recognition, if subordinates comply with the intent and direction settled by a leader and achieve the given objectives. Four core facets of transactional leadership as described by Schermerhorn et al., (2000) are contingent rewards, active management by exception, passive management by exception and laissez-faire. In transactional leadership, the center characteristic is the relation of exchange established between leaders and subordinates. In that sense, the transactional leader clarifies the goals that are to be achieved and makes it obvious that the successful achievement of these targets will involve rewards, while non-compliance with the targets will involve penalties (Bass et al., 1996; Bass et al., 2003). Hence, these leaders motivate their subordinates by establishing common agreements that, if effectively complied with over time, can be responsible for the subordinates’ development of feelings of trust in the leader (Whittington, Goodwin, Coker, Ickes, & Murray, 2009). Transactional leaders identify the expectations of their followers and respond to them by establishing a close link between effort and

In addition, impersonal media (e.g., emails) are used to elaborate the changes. With continuous incremental change at lower hierarchical levels, smaller changes are implemented, each of which can involve informal communication and active employee participation (Rafferty & Restubog, 2010). Managers implementing change are more likely to model the proposed changes and connect in unscheduled, face-to-face employee discussions. In return, employee-initiated questions and comments can encourage a considerable part of change-related communication. Participation can involve several employees simultaneously, and change-related issues might be resolved by bottom-up inputs about work processes. Through such interpersonal exchanges, employees develop positive reactions and become motivated to make change a reality (Levay, 2010). As managers strive to operationalize change, employees react to change in both intended and unintended ways.

For example, managers might have varying ideas on how to accomplish change that could be equally instrumental for invoking supportive change reactions. If employees misinterpret managers’ ideas for implementing change (Sonenshein, 2010), they might experience uncertainty about particular behaviors needed to achieve desired change objectives. These experiences can emotionally charge change contexts (Fugate,