TRANSACTIONAL & TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERS

Differences between Transactional and Transformational Leaders

Differences between Transactional and Transformational Leaders

Introduction

Leadership plays an important role in the organization. While with the development of the society, more and more managers pay attention to their leadership and relationship with employees. For Kotter, leadership is not only the activity or process of influencing people to strive willingly for the achievement of group objectives, but understanding an industry group of the organization with similar interests. Kotter considers necessary to develop a vision of what should be the organization and create the strategies needed to implement it, which is achieved through a cooperative coalition (network) of highly-motivated and committed to make that vision a reality. Kotter believes that leadership can be a mixture of both positions, as there are people who seem to be natural leaders but, they have learned to develop their leadership skills over time and experience, while another group People has certain limitations (including genetic inheritance) to define what they want and can do in life (Kotter, 1996).

Accordingly, the real challenge lies in how developed the leadership potential of individual. This idea is reinforced by Kotter when he says ... You cannot teach leadership. People learn to lead the same way as they learn any complicated social function, that is, slowly, over many years, mainly by trial and error, guided by a vision of what is good leadership and often with the encouragement of the model of other people with great leadership (Kotter, 1996). So I would like to talk about the theories between transactional leadership and transformation leadership, and give some realistic examples for each leadership model. Moreover, according to cite some survey to talk about which leadership is better.

Differences between Transactional and Transformational Leaders

First of all, Transformational leadership is defined as a leadership approach that creates valuable and positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders. Transformational leadership is characterized by the ability to produce substantive changes. Transformational leaders are able to undertake the changes in vision, strategy and organizational culture and to foster innovations in products and technologies. Transformational leadership, rather than analyze and monitor transactions with followers using rules, instructions and incentives, focusing on intangible qualities such as vision, shared values and ideas, in order to build relationships, to provide greater meaning different activities and to provide a common ground to enlist followers in the change process. Transformational leadership is founded on the values, beliefs and personal qualities of the leader and not a process of exchange between leaders and followers.

In transformational leadership style, rewards are high-quality exchanges between the leader and the followers because the leader's power is given by the followers. For the transformational leader, they encourage followers not only to perform as expected, but also to exceed expectations. Usually, transformational leaders transform the needs, values, preferences, and aspirations of followers, and motivate followers to work for goals that go beyond immediate self-interest, where what is right and good becomes ...