Transformational Approach To Leadership

760 Words4 Pages

One of the most popular and modern approaches to leadership that has been explored since 1980s is the transformational approach. Transformational leadership has been the part in the “New Leadership” paradigm (Bryman, 1992), and is oriented at charismatic and affective elements of leadership.
As the term implies, transformational leadership incorporates the changes and transformations both in the leader and his/her followers, thereby responding to the followers’ needs and motives, values, emotions and ethics. The term transformational leadership was first created by Downton (1973). Nonetheless, we owe its emergence as an important approach in leadership to James McGregor Burns’ work “Leadership”, which was brought out in 1978. Primarily, Burns …show more content…

According to Bass and Steidlmeier (1999), there are two types of transformational leadership defined, such as authentic transformational leadership and pseudo-transformational leadership. Following Burns (1978), Bass and Steidlmeier claim that authentic transformational leadership is based on ‘‘a moral foundation of legitimate values’’ (p. 184). To articulate the notion of legitimacy, Bass and Steidlmeier claim that this form of leadership is characterized by behavior that is ‘‘true to self and others’’ (p. 191). Accordingly, they state that ‘‘Authentic transformational leadership provides a more reasonable and realistic concept of self—a self that is connected to friends, family, and community whose welfare may be more important to oneself than one’s own’’ (pp. …show more content…

For instance, the authentic leader addresses to the universal unanimity; whereas the pseudo-transformational leader draws a line between “we-they” disparity in values, implying that “we” have innately good values and “they” do not. Therefore, what really does matter in this case is how the values of the leader are reflected in the actions.
According to Burns (1978), the principal concept which defines the authentic transformational leadership is the existence of morally uplifting values which can trigger the transformation in the leader. As Hollander (1995) states, transformational leadership is moral when the truth is told, promises are kept, negotiations are fair and choices are free. And it is immoral