Can Transactional Leadership Keep Your Team in Shape?
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs demonstrates that most people are more likely to act when they expect rewards or fear punishment. Any social system is more effective when a hierarchy clearly exists. People who are hired to work, implicitly agree to heed all of their manager's instructions, and that is the main reason that subordinates are employed.
When rewarding a subordinate, a transactional leader must create a clear structure of what is required of said worker when following orders. Alongside rewards, there should be a well understood formal system of discipline in place, although not always talked about.
Discussing the agreement where the subordinate is given an income and other remuneration, and the company (and by inference the worker's supervisor) acquires power over the worker is handled early period of Transactional Leadership.
Work that is delegated to an underling by a Transactional Leader is expected to be done; no excuses are acceptable and no pleading for more resources will be heeded. Just as a subordinate is rewarded for accomplishing his assigned duties, he is personally punished for failures that occur on his watch.
The transactional leader often manages by exception. They work on the idea that if something is working as it should be, then it does not need attention. An exception to this is going beyond expectations, which require praise and reward. The opposite applies for not meeting expectations, where instead of a reward, some kind of corrective action is taken.
Whereas Transformational Leadership has more of a 'selling' style, Transactional Leadership, once the contract is in place, takes a 'telling' style. Transactional leadership is based in contingency, in that reward or punishment is contingent upon performance.
Despite much research that highlights its limitations, Transactional Leadership is still a popular approach with many managers. Indeed, in the Leadership vs. Management spectrum, it is very much towards the management end of the scale.
Behaviorist psychology pioneers B.F.Skinner and Pavlov used carefully conducted experiments on controlled populations in a laboratory setting when formulating their famous theories of Operant and Classical Conditioning. While these shed much light on human and animal behavior, they fall short of understanding man's behavior fully. This is because they rely upon a model of a rational man, whose simple drive towards reward is unclouded by complex social and emotional issues.
Practically speaking, Behaviorism sounds quite reasonable to keep up methodologies involving transactions, which in turn is armored by the supply-and-demand situation of much employment, chained with the results of greater demands, as the theory of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs suggests. When the demand for a skill outruns the supply, transaction leadership becomes insufficient, making other such approaches highly recommended.
About the Author: Daiv Russell is a marketing and management consultant with Envision Web Marketing. Read more Articles about Small Business Management, learn about Abraham H. Maslow and the Maslow hierarchy.
More articles by Daiv Russell
Print Article | Download PDF | 78 views | Feb 13 2008
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