Transformational Leadership
1. What major leadership constructs/factors were discussed in the article?
Leadership behaviors that are associated with transformational leadership are discussed. These are:
Identifying and articulating vision.
Providing and appropriate model (of behavior).
Fostering the acceptance of group goals.
High performance expectations.
Providing individualized support.
Intellectual stimulation.
2. To what extent do these constructs predict an outcome of leadership (e.g., employee satisfaction, organizational performance)? Identify the outcomes and summarize the findings.
The outcomes are:
Transformational leader’s behavior has no direct effects on OCB’s.
Though, these behaviors influence employee trust as well as satisfaction.
Trust also influences OBC’s but does not have influence employee satisfaction.
This is not true with transactional leader’s behavior. They influence OCB’s directly.
The factor “intellectual stimulation” has a negative impact on trust and satisfaction.
3. What would be an important construct or outcome overlooked by the authors that you would consider important?
Factors such as:
Individual personality: Leader’s personality may predict the outcome across different situations.
Expressing confidence in followers.
Sense of self-efficacy of a leader can be considered as a mediating factor.
It can be seen that some of the factors are common to transactional leadership, but it does not specify that to what extent they correlate to the factors which are unique to transactional leadership. Are the former behaviors more prominent or the later?
Individual traits are not taken into consideration. Is it easy to train people to change their traits?
The first factor “identifying and articulating a vision” explains that the leader “identifies new opportunities…..vision of future”. This means that the leader is concerned about changing the followers’ values and replacing them with his or her vision. It does not mention if the new values are better than the old ones. If at all the new values turn to be wrong or demeaning, the description of transformational leader will be a challenge as the followers may stop believing him.