1.1 Transformational leadership enters business schools
Transformational leadership was later developed by business school academics with a view to adapting it to corporate life (Bass, 1985; Bass and Bass, 2008). Bass and Avolio (1995) claimed that there were four factors that differentiated transformational leadership. You can learn about these by clicking on each below.
These transformational qualities appear sensible enough. After all, working in an organisation where there is a lack of emotional connection, inspiration, intellectual challenge and where people don’t care about your needs seems dreary. Having said that, the theory is not making these claims about organisations in general but about leaders in particular, who are supposed to embody all of these qualities.
Activity 1 Transformational leadership and Rosa Parks
Revisit the Rosa Parks case study from Week 2, which you can download as a PDF here [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Judging Rosa Parks only by the four factors of transformational leadership, do you think she could be described as a transformational leader?
Try to have a conversation with someone about whether it is important that someone as significant as Rosa Parks was or was not ‘transformational’. Were there other equally important, or more important, aspects to Rosa Parks’ circumstances and leadership that are not captured by the theory?
Discussion
The interactive below discusses Rosa Parks in terms of the four factors of transformational leadership.
Rosa Parks was an inspirational and accomplished leader, and she does meet the criteria of transformational leadership. However, she also achieved something far more remarkable – she met these criteria and more despite being forced to live in debilitating poverty. Now imagine what so many potential leaders could achieve with the right level of support. Transformational leadership does not care about people’s material circumstances, and tends only to focus on people in senior positions within large corporate organisations. The theory also does not capture many aspects of Rosa Parks’ leadership, like how she used what power and position she had to lift up others and to support their leadership.
This activity drew attention to the fact that there are significant limitations associated with transformational leadership. You will now consider these limitations in more depth.