#Individuals Trivia no. 53

Transactional Leadership

Following on from the 'Contingency Era' of leadership theory, came the recognition of social interaction and role recognition.

Transactional leadership theories such as 'Vertical Dyad Linkage Theory' (Dansereau, Green & Haga, 1975) and 'Leader-Member Exchange Theory' (Dinenesh & Liden, 1986) empathized the importance of transactions between leaders and subordinates and the leader's role in initiating and sustaining interaction. Additionally, leaders may engage with different followers in different kinds of exchanges.

Some academics in the 'Transactional Leadership' era also recognized that the emergence of leaders requires their acknowledgement as such by followers, as well as recognising one key distinction between leaders and followers as being a leader’s ability to initiate and sustain interactions of group members towards goals (Bass, 1981).

In particular, leaders serve to acknowledge and advocate for the participation of less able group members. They are more accepting and accommodating of diverse personalities.

'Social Exchange Theory' (Hollander, 1979) saw the exchange between leaders and followers as being equitable with no domination on the part of leaders over followers or vice versa, since followers provide the leaders with recognition and esteem in exchange for enhancing follower success in reaching goals and the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that this brings.

In this conception, the leader acts as a role model and a facilitator of success but is also dependent, to a degree, upon the follower’s competence (Crowe, Bochner & Clarke, 1972). In this, and some other models of the era, it was recognised that at times leadership might reside in the followers and as such the leader may temporarily reverse roles and become the subordinate depending on the task at hand.

It was around this time, with the proliferation of so many variables from the 'Contingency Era' and the relationships espoused in the 'Transactional Era', that many academics began to argue that perhaps there was no single definable concept that could be called leadership; perhaps leadership was nothing more than a fleeting perception in the mind of the observer (Mitchell, 1979), or else the leader was little more than a symbol and that leader performance was of little consequence to follower outcomes (Pfeffer, 1977).

At this time of disillusionment came some theorists, such as Kerr and Jermier (1978), who advanced that some situational aspects of leadership could be substituted or embedded into structures and decision trees, which would enable followers to operate without leaders. However, many academics were quick to point out that it was leaders who were putting these structures into place and as such leadership had occurred over the followers but just at an earlier stage!

The period of cynicism about leadership was short lived, and in the early 1980’s, 'Leadership Theory' emerged into the 'Culture Era', where leadership was seen as existing at a level above the leader and the follower, or even a group of followers, but rather at the level of the organization and was embedded within an organization's culture.

Additionally, this era saw that leadership should not only be focused upon increasing the number of follower outputs but should also be concerned with increasing quality. As an extension of the previous period, academics like Manz and Sims (1987) suggested that leaders should focus on creating a cultural climate conducive of allowing followers to lead themselves, as self-managing work teams, based upon strong cultural principles established by the leader or leaders.

This system also had the advantage of producing future leaders with similar values and hence, formal leadership intervention was really only required when cultural change was required (Schein, 1985). The key role of the leader then becomes the recognition of the need for change and to act as its agent.

However, many were quick to point out that perhaps the most important context of organizations in contemporary society is that they operate in an environment of almost constant change and therefore the leader was almost always engaged in transforming the organization. The era of 'Transformational Leadership' theory was born.

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