Unit 7 topic overview and concepts

Transformational and Charismatic Leadership

A charismatic leader is often understood as a person who can best interact with those around him and his most powerful trait is that of making the people around him feel good about themselves. In an organizational context, this leads to improved employee morale and the subsequent improved employee performances (which ultimately materialize in improved organizational results).

From the same broader category of managers who strive to achieve improved organizational results through motivated staff members is the transformational leader. A transformational leader is generically understood as one who is able to identify the necessity for an organizational change; he implements the change and he stimulates the others to also embrace the modification. In the process, the transformational leader strives to better himself but also better the followers.

A major component of transformational leadership is the empowerment of the employees. On the one hand, this element presents the employees with the ability to directly participate in the change process and to better grasp the dimensions and the necessity for change. On the other hand, the empowerment of the employee stimulates his motivation as it makes him feel valued and appreciated within the organizational context. In turn, this materializes in higher levels of employee on the job satisfaction, which also means the degrees of employee loyalty and performance would be higher.

The leadership style adopted by the manager plays a pivotal part in the means in which the employees would respond to organizational strategies. In other words, an important determinant of the human resource strategies to be implemented within an organization is constituted by the style of the leader. This dimension of the managerial style -- be it transformational, charismatic, democratic or otherwise -- is often overlooked in the analysis of the managerial style, function and role.

Another important dimension of the transformational and charismatic leadership styles is the role of innovation in the process of managing people. This too is often overlooked, but its importance is incremental, especially today when innovation -- generally brought about by technological advancements -- is a constant of the daily life. Given the emergent challenges of the modern day society -- such as more and more pretensions customers, the incremental competition or the growing pressures towards environmental stability -- organizations are presented with the necessity of continually evolving and adapting to new requirements. Transformational leadership can support this dynamic organizational life by sustaining and promoting both creativity as well as innovation (Sarros, Cooper and Santora, 2008; Williams).

Transformational leadership is a relatively new concept and its implementation remains limited. Given this situation, combined with the scarcity of academic models detailing the gradual steps in the implementation of transformational leadership, a new theoretical need is identified. Some of the few sources which do integrate suggestions on the implementation of the managerial style include Stoerm Anderson and Ava Miller's Implementing transformational leadership as a model for service learning activities in an online RN to BSN leadership course or Russell L. Ackoff's a systemic view of transformational leadership.

All in all then, a transformational or charismatic managerial style goes beyond the generally discusses elements of characteristics, implementation, roles or other individual aspects. Charismatic and transformational managerial styles represent organizational cores, on which organizational cultures are constructed. They represent business models and they sit at the basis of organizational interactions with the various categories of stakeholders -- such as employees, customers, governmental and non-governmental institutions, the general public, purveyors and so on.