Transactional Leadership styles

 Transactional leadership relies more about 'trades' between the leader and follower by which followers are compensated for meeting specific goals or performance criteria . The transactional leader will first validate the relationship between performance and reward and then exchange it for an appropriate response that encourages subordinates to improve performance .

Transactional leadership in organizations plays an exchange role between managers and subordinates  Transactional leadership style is understood to be the exchange of rewards and targets between employees and management . Bass and Avolio explained Transactional leaders motivate subordinates through the use of contingent rewards, corrective actions and rule enforcement.

Bass Bernard explained that transactional leadership depends on contingent reinforcement, either positive contingent reward or the more negative active or passive forms of management-by-exception. Transactional leaders motivate followers through exchange; for example, accomplishing work in exchange for rewards or preferences . Kahai et al found group efficacy was higher under the transactional leadership condition. According to Burns , transactional leader tends to focus on task completion and employee compliance and these leaders rely quite heavily on organizational rewards and punishments to influence employee performance.

Transformational Leadership styles

Transformational leadership style concentrates on the development of followers as well as their needs. Managers with transformational leadership style concentrate on the growth and development of value system of employees, their inspirational level and moralities with the preamble of their abilities. According to Bass , the aim of transformational leadership would be to transform people and organizations inside a literal sense - to alter them in the mind and heart enlarge vision, insight and understanding clarify reasons make behavior congruent with values, concepts and brings about changes which are permanent, self-perpetuating and momentum building.

Transformational leadership happens when leader become wider and uphold the interests of the employees, once they generate awareness and acceptance for the purpose and assignment of the group, so when they blend employees to appear beyond their own self-interest for the good of the group.

Transformational leaders encourage followers to view problems from new perspectives, provide support and encouragement communicates a vision, stimulates emotion and identification. Bruce said that transformational leaders are able to define and articulate a vision for their organizations and their leadership style can influence or “transform” individual-level variables such as increasing motivation and organization-level variables, such as mediating conflict among groups or teams. Podsakoff et al disclosed transformational leadership had active influence on individual and organizational outcomes such as employee satisfaction and performance. Higher levels of transformational leadership were associated with higher levels of group potency

Joint leadership and Meta-leadership

Just as there are different leadership roles within social networks, there are also metaleadership roles that cut across networked organizations. When it comes to leading across different organizations, such as coalition partners, partnerships, alliances, joint command, or multi-agency missions, a new set of meta-leadership roles comes into play. These roles are different from those in a hierarchical organization where subordinates are required to execute orders or follow management directives and are held accountable for doing so. In joint command efforts, on the other hand, collaboration is peer-based, consensual, and mutual. There are no prior histories for building reciprocity, trust, or transparency. Therefore these have to be created anew over time. Moreover, as the leadership role is more one of governance than of command, the issue becomes how to cooperatively develop metrics and protocols that respect the integrity of each of the respective organizations.

 That being said, creating new meta-networks is much the same as creating any peer networked organization, except that the units are significantly larger and each has its own distinctive culture. Accordingly, certain leadership roles have to be established for all participants—specifically, what behaviors or traits best exemplify the qualities and standard being sought of the meta-network. Since leadership in joint efforts typically rotates over time, exemplar leadership roles should be filled by those who have qualities that are not closely identified with any one particular organization or Service. Rather, an effort should be made to give this networked organization its own independent identity. An early visionary can act as the exemplar member and personify the desired qualities,thereby setting a precedent for others to follow. However, there should be an effort to identify other network leadership roles and the associated metrics and protocols that the different representatives of the joint organizations would undertake.

Leadership and creativity in military contexts

Today’s armed forces around the world operate in complex, dynamic, and often dangerous geopolitical contexts. Military and civilian scholars alike have identified implications these challenging environments have for the nature of modern day warfare and, consequently, the need for identifying leadership paradigms enabling military leaders to respond adaptively to a wide range of strategic, operational, and tactical challenges. The creative capacity of leaders and their followers has become increasingly important in military leadership contexts. This reviews the literature on creativity and leadership as it pertains to military contexts, focusing on creative attributes and behavior of leaders themselves and on leaders as facilitators of individual follower and team creativity. 

The Process of Great Leadership

The road to great leadership (Kouzes & Posner, 1987) that is common to successful leaders:

• Challenge the process - First, find a process that you believe needs to be improved the most.

• Inspire a shared vision - Next, share your vision in words that can be understood by your followers.

• Enable others to act - Give them the tools and methods to solve the problem.

• Model the way - When the process gets tough, get your hands dirty. A boss tells others what to do, a leader shows that it can be done.

• Encourage the heart - Share the glory with your followers' hearts, while keeping the pains within your own.

Goals, Values, and Concepts

Leaders exert influence on the environment via three types of actions:

1. The goals and performance standards they establish.

2. The values they establish for the organization.

3. The business and people concepts they establish.

Successful organizations have leaders who set high standards and goals across the entire spectrum, such as strategies, market leadership, plans, meetings and presentations, productivity, quality, and reliability.

Values reflect the concern the organization has for its employees, customers, investors, vendors, and surrounding community. These values define the manner in how business will be conducted.

Concepts define what products or services the organization will offer and the methods and processes for conducting business.

These goals, values, and concepts make up the organization's personality or how the organization is observed by both outsiders and insiders. This personality defines the roles, relationships, rewards, and rites that take place.

Principles of Leadership

1. Order to know yourself, you have to understand Know yourself and seek self-improvement - In your be, know, and do, attributes. Seeking self-improvement means continually strengthening your attributes. This can be accomplished through self-study, formal classes, reflection, and interacting with others.

2. Be technically proficient - As a leader, you must know your job and have a solid familiarity with your employees' tasks.

3. Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions - Search for ways to guide your organization to new heights. And when things go wrong, they always do sooner or later — do not blame others. Analyze the situation, take corrective action, and move on to the next challenge.

4. Make sound and timely decisions - Use good problem solving, decision making, and planning tools.

5. Set the example - Be a good role model for your employees. They must not only hear what they are expected to do, but also see. We must become the change we want to see - Mahatma Gandhi

6. Know your people and look out for their well-being - Know human nature and the importance of sincerely caring for your workers.

7. Keep your workers informed - Know how to communicate with not only them, but also seniors and other key people.

8. Develop a sense of responsibility in your workers - Help to develop good character traits that will help them carry out their professional responsibilities.

9. Ensure that tasks are understood, supervised, and accomplished - Communication is the key to this responsibility.

10.             Train as a team - Although many so called leaders call their organization, department, section, etc. a team; they are not really teams...they are just a group of people doing their jobs.

11.             Use the full capabilities of your organization - By developing a team spirit, you will be able to employ your organization, department, section, etc. to its fullest capabilities.

The Two Most Important Keys to Effective Leadership

According to a study by the Hay Group, a global management consultancy, there are 75 key components of employee satisfaction (Lamb, McKee, 2004). They found that:

• Trust and confidence in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization.

• Effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence:
  

1. Helping employees understand the company's overall business strategy.

2. Helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives.

3. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee's own division is doing — relative to strategic business objectives.

So in a nutshell — you must be trustworthy and you have to be able to communicate a vision of where the organization needs to go. The next section, Principles of Leadership, ties in closely with this key concept.

Total Leadership

What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by those they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.

When a person is deciding if she respects you as a leader, she does not think about your attributes, rather, she observes what you do so that she can know who you really are. She uses this observation to tell if you are an honorable and trusted leader or a self-serving person who misuses authority to look good and get promoted. Self-serving leaders are not as effective because their employees only obey them, not follow them. They succeed in many areas because they present a good image to their seniors at the expense of their workers.

Be           Know           Do

The basis of good leadership is honorable character and selfless service to your organization. In your employees' eyes, your leadership is everything you do that effects the organization's objectives and their well-being. Respected leaders concentrate on (U.S. Army, 1983):

• what they are [be] (such as beliefs and character)

• what they know (such as job, tasks, and human nature)

• what they do (such as implementing, motivating, and providing direction).

What makes a person want to follow a leader? People want to be guided by those they respect and who have a clear sense of direction. To gain respect, they must be ethical. A sense of direction is achieved by conveying a strong vision of the future.

Bass' Theory of Leadership

Bass' theory of leadership notes there are three basic ways to explain how people become leaders (Bass, Bass, 2008; Stogdill, 1989; Bass, 1990):

• A crisis or important event may cause a person to rise to the occasion, which brings out extraordinary leadership qualities in an ordinary person. This is the Great Event or Great Man Theory.
• Some personality traits may lead people naturally into leadership roles. This is the Trait Theory.
• People can choose to become leaders. People can learn leadership skills. This is the Transformational or Process Leadership Theory. It is the most widely accepted theory today and the premise on which this guide is based.
  

The first theory, The Great Man, was one of the first theories of leadership development and perhaps might explain leadership for a small number of people. A big event occurs and an individual takes charge and moves the direction of a country, movement, war, etc. For example Martin Luther King Jr. moves the Civil Rights moment to the edge of change and President Lincoln directs the course of the Civil War.

The Great Man Theory drew attention to the specific qualities of these leaders and attempted to explain leadership in terms of personality and character, thus the Trait Theory was born. Two questions were generally asked:

• What traits distinguish leaders from other people?
• What is the extent of the difference?

This was the primary theory of leadership until the 1940s. While traits remain an important part of leadership theory today, it has moved beyond this original concept—Transformational Theory.

Transformational can best be compared to Transactional. A transactional leader works within the framework whereas a transformational leaders works to change the framework. For example, President Buchanan was content to stand-by and allow the union to fall apart, while President Lincoln stepped in and held it together. Thus President Buchanan has a consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents, while Lincoln is just the opposite.

Buchanan worked within the framework of his time while Lincoln strived to change that framework. Change normally takes skills and knowledge, which can be taught, thus while the Transformational Leaders have good traits, they also strive to learn and grow.

Four Factors of Leadership

Leader

You must have an honest understanding of who you are, what you know, and what you can do. Also, note that it is the followers, not the leader or someone else who determines if the leader is successful. If they do not trust or lack confidence in their leader, then they will be uninspired. To be successful you have to convince your followers, not yourself or your superiors, that you are worthy of being followed.

Followers

Different people require different styles of leadership. For example, a new hire requires more supervision than an experienced employee. A person who lacks motivation requires a different approach than one with a high degree of motivation. You must know your people! The fundamental starting point is having a good understanding of human nature, such as needs, emotions, and motivation. You must come to know your employees' be, know, and do attributes.

Communication

You lead through two-way communication. Much of it is nonverbal. For instance, when you “set the example,” that communicates to your people that you would not ask them to perform anything that you would not be willing to do. What and how you communicate either builds or harms the relationship between you and your employees.

Situation

All situations are different. What you do in one situation will not always work in another. You must use your judgment to decide the best course of action and the leadership style needed for each situation. For example, you may need to confront an employee for inappropriate behavior, but if the confrontation is too late or too early, too harsh or too weak, then the results may prove ineffective.

Also note that the situation normally has a greater effect on a leader's action than his or her traits. This is because while traits may have an impressive stability over a period of time, they have little consistency across situations (Mischel, 1968). This is why a number of leadership scholars think the Process Theory of Leadership is a more accurate than the Trait Theory of Leadership.

Various forces will affect these four factors. Examples of forces are your relationship with your seniors, the skill of your followers, the informal leaders within your organization, and how your organization is organized.

Definition of Leadership

The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image. — Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society

Before we get started, lets define leadership. Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. This definition is similar to Northouse's (2007, p3) definition — Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.

Leaders carry out this process by applying their leadership knowledge and skills. This is called Process Leadership (Jago, 1982). However, we know that we have traits that can influence our actions. This is called Trait Leadership (Jago, 1982), in that it was once common to believe that leaders were born rather than made.

While leadership is learned, the skills and knowledge processed by the leader can be influenced by his or hers attributes or traits, such as beliefs, values, ethics, and character. Knowledge and skills contribute directly to the process of leadership, while the other attributes give the leader certain characteristics that make him or her unique.

Skills, knowledge, and attributes make the Leader.

Concepts of Leadership

Good leaders are made not born. If you have the desire and willpower, you can become an effective leader.To inspire your workers into higher levels of teamwork, there are certain things you must be, know, and, do. These do not come naturally, but are acquired through continual work and study. Good leaders are continually working and studying to improve their leadership skills; they are NOT resting on their laurels.