Transformational Leadership

 DEFINITION

Transformational Leadership is a leadership style where 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.

Transformational Leaders stimulate and inspire their followers to achieve extraordinary outcomes and, in the process, develop their followers’ own leadership capacity. These leaders help followers to grow and develop by responding to followers’ individual needs by empowering them and aligning the objectives and goals of the individual followers, the leader, the group, and the larger organization (Bass & Riggio, 2006).

Transformational Leader's Goal is to inspire followers to share the leaders’ values and connect with the leader’s vision.

4 TRANSFORMATIONAL MODELS & DIMENSIONS

STRENGTH

 Widely researched intuitive appeal 

 Focuses on the follower too 

 Emphasis on followers’ needs, values, and morals 

 Enthusiastic work atmosphere 

 Innovations 

 Higher output and efficiency 

 Develops future leaders 

 People will work for leader even if monetary compensation is less

 WEAKNESEES 

X Lacks conceptual clarity 

X Validity of MLQ is questionable 

X Fixed trait or malleable state 

X Potentially elitist or antidemocratic 

X Totally depends on ability of leader 

X Leaders might lack the required characteristics

THE WORLD TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS

1. Oprah Winfrey: Media Mogul

Oprah Winfrey, sometimes called the “Queen of All Media,” hosted The Oprah Winfrey Show from 1986 to 2011. It was the highest-rated talk show in history, and Winfrey became the richest African American of the 20th century. She was also North America’s first black multi-billionaire. Time Magazine named her one of the most influential people in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Winfrey’s communication skills, beginnings in poverty, and charismatic leadership enabled her to connect with people from diverse backgrounds, inspiring people to dream big. A Forbes article from October 2010 reported that Winfrey is a leader to emulate as she is able to inspire her staff to execute her vision while maintaining mass appeal. The article went on to deconstruct her leadership as having three branches: her team, vision and values. As for her values, she has spread her wealth through her Oprah Winfrey Foundation and several other philanthropic ventures.

2. Satya Nadella: CEO of Microsoft 

In 2014, Satya Nadella took over as the new CEO at Microsoft. He was to bring about one of the biggest transformational changes the company had ever seen. For example, there was a major shift in cloud networking services. The focus, it was decided, was to move away from traditional software products and toward a more fluid cloud system solution for both personal and enterprise customers. Public perception was changed as Microsoft went from an old school stagnant company to a forward-thinking one with cloud solutions ready for business and today’s personal lifestyles. Stocks increased from $38 in early 2014 to $214 as of October 2020.

3. Nelson Mandela: Former President of South Africa, Anti-Apartheid Revolutionary

Nelson Mandela would become known as one of the most famous transformational leaders in the world. During his time as the leader of South Africa, Mandela successfully used the country’s love of sports in 1995’s Rugby World Cup as a medium to promote reconciliatory efforts, which instilled a sense of nationalistic pride in all of South Africa’s peoples. His promotion of rights to all citizens through this event was a major factor in elevating public awareness of equality.

4. Reed Hastings: Founder of Netflix

Blockbuster, as a favorite of movie lovers. Hastings, coming from the software business, had a grander vision, unfettered by any entertainment experience to stand in his way. He introduced streaming, and his gamble paid off. Today Netflix has about 192.95 million subscribers worldwide, and is the largest online streaming provider of video content.

5. Jeff Bezos: Founder of Amazon

It was a little-known online bookselling company back in 1994 with Jeff Bezos as its CEO. The plan was to sell books online and hopefully break even eventually. Amazons stock boosted about 5000 percent between 1994 to 1997 and later that year took on another transformational format in creating an eReader market by introducing their Kindles. Bezos bet that he could change the way we read books by turning them into digital content, where many books can be loaded on one device for consumption. Transforming book sales, and later introducing multi-product sales has given Amazon a market value of $1.14 trillion as of April 2020.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

How to protect specific investments from opportunism: A moderated mediation model of customer integration and transformational leadership

International Journal of Production Economics

Volume 232, February 2021, 107938
Authors:Kedi Wang, Baofeng Huo, Min Tian

School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

 
2. Transformational leadership and employees' perception of supply chain integration and organizational performance: The case of textile industry in Vietnam 

Authors:Thi Van Anh Buia, Thi Thuy Hang Phamb, Xuan Trang Phungc , Cong Thanh Led and Ngoc Toan Nguyene*

Scopus Jurnal

3. Achieving environmental sustainability through green transformational leadership policy: Can green team resilience help?

Authors:Serdar Çop  Victor Oluwafemi Olorunsola  Uju Violet Alola

Scopus Jurnal

COMPARISON  ON TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP

The difference between charismatic leadership and transformational leadership is:

1. Charismatic leadership gravitates around the leader and the persona of the leader. Transformational centers around a common vision and focus on improving and evolving all team members to reach another level.
2. Transformational leadership builds on transparency and empowerment, whereas Charismatic Leadership is built on listening to what the charismatic leader tells you.
3. Transformation leadership has development of the individuals as a prioritized area, in charismatic leadership, the followers are more of tools to reach the target.

Charismatic leadership vs Transformational leadership: Vision      

In transformational leadership the vision is put together by the group whereas the charismatic leader is like to have a vision that then becomes the vision of the followers. Hence, the transformational leadership has a much more democratic approach to setting the vision.

Whereas the vision or cause is the end result in charismatic leadership, the transformational leadership style also puts high priority on improving and developing the people in the organization. The people led by with the charismatic leadership style are much more of followers than participators and developing them would be a sidetrack since the leader and the vision of the leader is the most important focus item.

Charismatic leadership vs Transformational leadership: Empowerment and transparency

The charismatic leadership style builds to a certain extent on the obedience of the followers. Obedience means you do what you are told, and much less efforts are therefor put on transparency and explanations.

In transformational leadership it is quite the opposite. In this style, the team members are purposely empowered in order to contribute with initiative and engagement. This is seen as a way of developing people as well as reaching higher productivity.

You can pretty much forget about empowerment in the context of the charismatic leadership style. Why would you need to be empowered? There is already the one great leader who brought you the big vision, and by the way, the leader is to charismatic and popular anyway so why worry about that. 

Charismatic leadership vs Transformational leadership: Developing the team members

In transformational leadership, one of the key purposes is to develop the team members so they can learn and evolve. The thought is that people can transform into achieving better and more in the future. This is a key element in finally reaching the vision of the organization and making it stronger for the future.

In charismatic leadership, developing people is not a focus area. The focus area is the leader and fulfilling the vision of that leader. The personal characteristics and persona of the leader is seen as far more essential than those of the followers. There is simply not much room for anything else but the persona and the vision in an organization where the charismatic leadership style is used fully.

Some words on Transformational Leadership vs Charismatic Leadership

To summarize, both leadership styles have a high focus on vision, but how it is shaped and how it is deployed is different. Treatment of team members and followers of the leader is also very different.

Let’s be careful on the use of the word charisma though. A leader can be charismatic without deploying what is known as the charismatic leadership style. It is often a good thing to be charismatic and a leader with strong charisma is in my mind more likely to succeed with most of the leadership styles.

The transformational leadership style can be deployed by a charismatic leader as well as a leader with absolutely no charisma whatsoever. As said, being charismatic might speed things up and make it easier to receive buy in, but, the style can be used with literally zero charisma.

On the contrary, you cannot use the charismatic leadership style if you are not charismatic. The charisma and persona of the leader is completely engrained into this leadership style. It simply wouldn’t be the charismatic leadership style if a person without charisma tried to use it.