Transformational Leadership

During the past few decades, great organizational, societal and cultural changes have occurred. Globalization and technology have caused a reorganization of the supply-chain and worker-chain with an accompaniment of new forms of learning and knowledge sharing (Latchem & Hanna, 2001a). Free and wide-spread information on the Internet challenges the traditional authority and the control over knowledge of educators and leaders in administration as well as the way teachers and students interact in the institutions. People are encouraged to question authority when necessary. The concept of “going beyond one’s interests for the good of the organization” is no longer accepted unconditionally (Bass, 1999). The changes and challenges led to various explorations on leadership theory in seeking for effective leadership models for the new era in which people ask for changes but do not have a clear track for doing that. Leadership theories such as transformational leadership, distributed leadership, and complexity leadership have been developed in an attempt to describe the new phenomena, predict what will happen, and suggest strategies for effective leadership. Transformational leadership theory among all the existing theories is the one that underscores the importance of changing the mindset of the subordinators, building trust for the willingness to internalize organizational values, and encourage the follower to become the leader. In today’s fast-changing environment of education, the problems people confront often did not exist before. There is a greater need for everyone to respond to one’s unique problems properly and timely instead of waiting for instructions from the supervisors. Transformational leadership is needed for facilitating the capability.

Transactional Leadership vs. Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership has been introduced after the research on behavioral leadership such as great-man leadership and trait-based leadership that assumed that leadership is rooted in the characteristics that certain individuals possess. James Burns (1978) first introduced two types of leadership styles: transactional and transformational leadership. Most of the traditional leaderships are transactional leadership in which the leader and the follower work together under informal contracts. The leader gives instructions to the follower about what they need to do and provides rewards when the follower completes the instruction. The leader and the follower exchange resources to meet their own self-interests. Distinct from transactional leadership, transformational leaders aim at inducing positive change in individuals through articulating vision of the future that can be shared with peers and subordinators, inspiring subordinators’ motivation, intellectually stimulate subordinates, and pay high attention to individual differences among people (Bass, 1999; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996). The transformational leadership approach uplifts the morale, motivation, and morals of their followers with the end goal of developing the follower into a leader (Bass, 1999).

Educators usually have higher academic qualification than the average people in their society. They are expected to be intelligent while playing roles as moral models. Leading an institution that is mainly formed by a group of educators to fulfill the missions of education requires a values-driven approach (Latchem & Hanna, 2001b). Aitkin (1998) and Bass (1999) argued that if the power of the educational leaders is to be used effectively, the leader (vice-chancellor) must “have a sense of mission, an agenda, a vision … those attributes need to come from inside, not from the university itself … from reflection and from one’s personal values.” (Aitkin, 1998, p. 123) Latchem and Hanna (2001c) also highlighted that educational leaders should see themselves as educators who are capable of enabling other team members to acquire and exercise the leadership skills. Drawing on these view points, educational leaders can only achieve real and lasting commitment to change by adopting more of transformational leadership approach and less transactional leadership approach. As noted by Sir John Daniel: “I believe that a leader should spend more time crating meaning for people than making decisions for them.” (Daniel, 2001. p. 143)

Other Leadership Theories vs. Transformational Leadership Theory

Theories for emergent leadership and other leaderships based on the contingency theory have shared a common assumption that there is no single correct leadership for all contexts and the best leadership is defined by external factors such as the characteristics of the subordinators, the type of work and the stress level in the organization. This situational perspective for adopting leadership has influenced almost all modern theories of leadership (Envision Software, Inc., 2011 Jan. 21) including transformational leadership. However, emergent leadership and other styles of leadership based on contingency theory focus more on the leader’s ability to diagnose the competence and commitment of the subordinators and respond accordingly (Latchem & Hanna, 2001b) without stressing the importance of internal factors such as ideal, vision, mission, value, or motivation and individualized concerns. An important constituent of educational leadership is missing from the leaderships with situational perspective.

The same limitation exists in distributed leadership. Distributed leadership approach was developed around four central ideas – leadership tasks and functions, task-enactment, social distribution of task-enactment, and situational distribution of task-enactment (Spillane, 2004). The main examination of distributed leadership is its practice distributed over leaders, followers and their situation and incorporates the activities of multiple groups of individuals.” (Spillane, 2004) The ideal influence of the leadership has not been brought to the up front of the theory.

Another theory of leadership that was introduced lately is that of complexity leadership theory. Complexity leadership theory considers leadership to be a system function that enables adaptive action in complex adaptive systems. This theory could be powerful in describing the leadership occurs in informal learning environment such as self-organized learning communities and open learning. It is not the intension of complexity leadership theory to describe the leadership in formal learning in official academic institutions that has official internal and external hierarchies on which this paper focuses.

Dipetik dari: http://www.educause.edu/blog/susanlulee