Transformational Leadership and Transactional Leadership

Transactional Leadership and Transformational Leadership Transactional leadership style is a leadership style that uses group performance, organization, and supervision to get results. It is also called managerial leadership. This leadership style is focused on getting specific tasks done and the leader may use punishments and rewards as motivational tools. A good structure is highly valued in such a scenario as is highly apparent in situations such as the military and big companies where the leadership style is widely used (Cherry, 2018).

Transactional leadership is not an optimal leadership style where innovation and creativity are highly required. Nonetheless, in environments where the completion of tasks requires specific linear processes, a transactional leader is likely to excel. The leadership style is therefore very useful for large big organizations with well-defined processes. The military, policing, and sports franchises also have leaders with transactional leadership qualities (Cherry, 2018). A great example of a transactional leader is Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a well known American businessman who was born in 1955.

He founded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1978. Microsoft grew fast and grossed $2.5 million dollars 3 years after it was founded. At this time, Bill Gates was only 23 years old. The company went on to launch Windows in 1985. Windows became a transformational product in the computing world and brought Bill Gates and Microsoft’s other shareholders tremendous wealth. The success of Windows can be attributed to Bill Gate’s ability to successfully execute a transactional leadership style.

He would supervise product teams by visiting their stations and would ask very specific questions that ensured that the teams always knew the exact results the company required them to produce and that they were always on track (Cherry, 2018). Transformational leadership as a concept was formally introduced in 1978 by James McGregor Burns in a book titled ‘Leadership’. Transformational leadership has existed for the entirety of human history.

However small the teams they lead were, past transformational leaders helped create solutions that helped man overcome some of the challenges he was facing at the time. In the current work environment, transformational leaders help their teams define their challenges, identify the resources they need and the resources available, inspire visions, and motivate their team members to perform at their best. This process also helps their team members grow as people as well as in their skill-sets (Burns, 1978).

A great example of someone who executed transformational leadership well is Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights leader who inspired millions of people to action to take steps towards the end of racism. His unusual but peaceful strategies garnered support from both black and white people. In the process, he made his followers and supporters feel as if they owned the movement. Many race-related issues were peacefully resolved because of Dr. King’s transformational leadership (Bhasin, 2017).

Comparisons are often drawn between transformational leadership and transactional leadership. For transactional leadership to work well, the team in question should be self-motivated and they should work in an environment that is structured and directed. In contrast, transformational leadership’s main feature is its ability to inspire and motivate people into action. Instead of plainly directing people on what to do, transformational leadership inspires workers to take action.

It can be argued that transformational leadership “sells’ the team on the vision and this inspires them to take action while transactional leadership simply “tells” the team what to do to achieve certain targets and expects them to follow through regardless of whether or not they believe in the vision or not. To ensure action is taken, transactional leadership uses negative and positive reinforcement. Transformational leadership, on the other hand, uses inspiration and motivation (Burns, 1978).

Qualities of Transactional and Transformational Leaders Transactional leaders carefully monitor the people working under them to ensure that rules are followed and expectations are met. They punish failure and reward success. Transactional leaders are not focused on being catalysts for change in the organizations they lead. Instead, their focus is always on ensuring that rules and expectations that have already been set are met. They also tend to be good at drawing the said rules and expectations.

Further, they are good at optimizing processes to ensure that maximum efficiency is attained. They also give feedback to their followers about their performance and this provides a great basis for the followers to raise their performance (Almiron et al, 2015).

A great transformational leader should have the capacity to inspire his or her followers, set high performance standards, set clear objectives, visions, or goals, appreciate the effort made by the followers, encourage the team to work for the greater good of the movement or organization and not for selfish reasons, and challenge followers to do their very best.

One of the key aspects of transformational leadership is that the leader doesn’t care so much about his or her performance metrics or deliverables but cares about the success of the whole group (Redziniak, 2006). The Effectiveness of Each Type of Leadership Transactional leadership is being effectively used in today’s fast-paced work environment. One of the areas where it is fully embraced is in multinationals where workers have different cultures and languages. Such an environment requires well-defined work structures and procedures.

Once these structures have been taught to the workers, it becomes very easy for them to work within the system and complete tasks that align with the overall objectives of the big organization. Structures set by a transactional leader can be easily understood and applied across an organization. It ensures consistency and makes expectations clear to all workers working within the system. One of the areas transactional leadership excels in is situations where there is a crisis.

Since tasks are well-defined and expectations are clear, workers can get results even when they are working under a lot of pressure (Almiron et al, 2015). When he led Microsoft, Bill Gates presented himself as a strict leader. Under his leadership, Microsoft effectively became a monopoly within its space. As Microsoft grew, Bill Gates strove to create barriers of entry for potential competitors. This was on top of ensuring that Microsoft’s products were exceeding customers’ expectations in the marketplace.

Achieving this required a leader who was very task and goal-oriented. The rigidity in control of processes and expectations ensured that there were few errors as there was no room for error in the first place. Subordinates and partners had to pull their weight and Bill Gates transactional leadership style ensured they met these expectations (Cherry, 2018). Transformational leadership can also be effective but it falls short in various key areas such as tracking progress and enforcement of boundaries.

For it to be fully effective, a transformational leader should also embrace other leadership styles and have a mix of transformational leadership skills and other task-oriented leadership styles such as transactional leadership. Dr. King’s inspirational speeches were a big part of his leadership arsenal. To achieve his goals of ending racial discrimination, his movement also embraced leadership tools outside of the transformational leadership style to get the results they wanted.

The movement had structures that ensured fast mobilization of followers and the pushing of key messages (Redziniak, 2016) The great positive changes his transformational leadership brought to race relations in the United States are still being felt half a century after his death. He persuaded a big part of the population, both black and white, to see his vision of an equal America that it was almost impossible to ignore the movement he had created.

Having inspired a large part of the population to action, a series of events were set in motion that led to big changes in race.