final paper of leading in an organization

Transactional Leadership 4

Transactional Leadership

Abdussamet Akca

Leading In An Organization

11/15/2020

Transactional leadership

Leadership is one of the vastly discussed topics in literature. Leadership is defined as the art of motivating a group of people to realize a common goal or objective. It simply means the act of acting as a guide or leading people towards a common goal. There must be one person who serves as a leader from whom a direction is taken in every group of people. Employs play a significant role in the realization of the company objectives and goals. When employees better understand their parts and expectations, they are likely to excel in the work and responsibilities. Different leadership styles have different approaches that they use for work to be done. Leadership has a positive influence on the organization's performance and efficiency because it has a more significant impact on the organization's team members (Crews et al., 2019). Therefore, it is crucial to understand the leadership style that is very relevant for an organization, precisely the leadership style that motivates the employees towards work and excellence. Even though leadership is responsible for allocating tasks, different leadership types have different approaches to how these tasks are assigned. Because leaders have a more significant influence on the employees' performance, it is vital to choose the type of leadership to use in a company. Currently, most organizations emphasize the formation of teams that would increase the organization's efficiency. To achieve this efficiency of workflow, leaders' role in the organization is of higher importance. 

There has been a problem of poor leadership and governance witnessed among organizations applying the use of transactional leadership. The widespread criticism in the application of transactional leadership has a more significant impact on the employees' performance because it reduces the employees' motivation and creativity in doing work for the following reasons. First, transactional leadership has a different view of inspiration, contrary to what employees and workers. Transactional leadership assumes that employees only perform tasks mainly to be rewarded and also to avoid being punished. Hardworking employees are not rewarded for their extra effort because they already have rewards informing salary or wages. As a result, many employees always feel very demotivated to work hard.

In many cases, transactional leaders believe that employees' jobs are done based on profit exchange in the form of money or other valuable properties. Hence the need to give extra rewards to the hardworking employees. The next problem that employees face under transactional leadership is that no mistake goes unpunished. 

Thirdly transactional leadership is very rigid. Transactional leaders have stringent opinions and expectations regarding the working relationship between the leaders and the employees. They believe that employees are subjects to their leaders from whom all commands and directions are obtained. As a result, it is marred with blames. A transactional leader will never be accountable when work goes wrong. He /she will only be blaming yen employees for the mess that happens in the organization.

To solve the leadership gap and problems witnessed in an organization where transactional leadership is being used, the company management should consider restricting their leadership chart and adopting a transformational leadership style. Under transformational leadership, employees are highly motivated to work because of the rewards and incentives to excel (Hansen et al., 2019). Transformational leadership recognizes hard work. Leaders and employees consult each other, and everyone is responsible for a mistake or a mess. There are no blames. 

References

Crews, E. R., Brouwers, M., & Visagie, J. C. (2019). Transformational and transactional leadership effects on communication styles. Journal of Psychology in Africa, 29(5), 421-428.

Hansen, J. A., & Pihl-Thingvad, S. (2019). Managing employee innovative behaviour through transformational and transactional leadership styles. Public Management Review, 21(6), 918-944.