Article Component Papers (Charismatic & Transformation Leadership)

A SEMINAL SHIFT: THE IMPACT OF JAMES BURNS’ LEADERSHIP

Bernard M. Bass State University of New York at Binghamton

Ever since I was a graduate student in the 194Os, I have struggled with how to connect the study of leadership in small groups with the study of world class leaders. At that time, a paradigmic shift was set in motion by Carroll Shartle and his colleagues at Ohio State University who began the exploration of what leaders do instead of what traits they possess. Thirty years later, in Leadership, James Burns initiated a second paradigmic shift.

Most of the previous experimental research study of leaders had been of first-line supervisors and college sophomores in small temporary groups and such studies of what leaders do had focused on what Burns conceived as transactions with followers. The leaders exchanged promises (or threats) for follower agreement, collaboration, or compliance. Such contingent reinforcement, which tended to describe what small-group leaders did in experimental settings, lit nicely with the love affair of economists and psychologists with reinforcement and accounted for a considerable portion of the variance in the interactions between lower-level supervisors and their immediate subordinates. Political leaders exchanged promises for votes.

Burns argued, however, that the statesmen who moved and shook the world, the leaders of social and political movements, of industry and government, also did something quite different. They transformed their followers. Instead of John F. Kennedy asking what can your country do for you, he asked what you could do for your country. As a biographer of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Kennedy, Burns was struck by the extent to which such world-class leaders not only practiced the transactional leadership of contingent reinforcement but also transformed their followers. Instead of, or in addition to, catering to the self-interests of their followers by making and keeping promises of rewards for compliance or threatening and

Leadership Quarterly, 4(3/4), 375-377. Copyright @ 1993 by JAI Press Inc.

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376 LEADERSHIP QUARTERLY Vol. 4 No. 3/4 1993

disciplining them for noncompliance, transformational leaders moved their followers to transcend their self-interests for the sake of their group, organization, or society.

Such leaders increased their followers’ awareness of values, of what was good, right, and important. In so doing, they moved their followers to a higher order of motivation

on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Transformational leaders were conceived by Burns

to contribute to the motivational maturity and moral development of their followers.

In doing so, Burns directed significance of the leadership to the development of their followers’ and their followers’ organizations.

The timing was right. House (1977) had just published his seminal model of charisma,

converting sociological theory into testable behavioral propositions. Industry was

rediscovering that leadership was an important, if not the most important, component

of management (Kotter, 1987). While by the early 1960s Ralph Stogdill’s LBDQ Form

XII (1963) and John Hemphill’s (1960) factor studies of executive behavior had opened

up consideration of some of the transformational behaviors of leaders, and Downton

(1973) had independently used the label transformational leader to discuss rebel and

reform leaders, no coherent theory was offered to explain what was going on until

Burns’s book appeared.

Given the Burns’ conception, it then became possible to initiate empirical studies of

attributes and behaviors of the transformational leader as well as to begin to account

for the sociological and historical literature on charisma in the same framework (Bass,

1985).

Much has been accomplished as a consequence of Burns’s seminal contribution.

Factored scales to measure the attitudes and behaviors of transformational and

transactional leadership have been validated (Bass & Avolio, 1990, 1993). The greater

effectiveness of transformational leadership in many countries has been established

(Bass, in press)-although, as Burns’ own biography 77re Fox and the Lion illustrated, the best of leaders are both transformational and transactional (Waldman, Bass, &

Yammarino, 1988). Large-scale training programs in transformational leadership have

also been initiated (Avolio & Bass, 1991). In the last decade, at least 30 doctoral

dissertations and an equal number of research publications have been completed by

investigators in the United States and abroad in industry, the military, education,

hospitals, and elsewhere.

In short, it is possible to find 300 or more books on leadership in a university library. Among these, Burns’s Leadership is unique in how much it redirected scholarship,

research, and practice on the subject.

REFERENCES

Avolio, B.J., & Bass, B.M. (1991). 77re fill range of leadership. Binghamton, NY: Bass/Avolio & Associates.

Bass, B.M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York: Free Press. Bass, B.M. (In press). Is there universality in the full range model of leadership? International

Journal of Public Administration.

Bass, B.M., & Avolio, B.J. (1990). The multifactor leadership survey. (Manual.) Palo Alto, CA:

Consulting Psychologists Press.

A Seminal Shift 377

Bass, B.M., & Avolio, B.J. (1993). Transformational leadership: A response to critiques. In M. Chemers & R. Ammon (Eds.), Leadership theory andresearch: Perspectives anddirections. New York: Academic.

Burns, J.M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row. Downton, J. (1973). Rebel leadership: Commitment and charisma in the revolutionary process.

New York: Free Press. Hemphill, J.K. (1960). Dimensions of executive positions. Columbus: Bureau of Business

Research, Ohio State University. House, R.J. (1977). A 1976 theory of charismatic leadership. In J.G. Hunt & L.L. Larson (Eds.),

Leadership: The cutting edge. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Kotter, J.P. (1987). 77re leadership factor. New York: Free Press. Stogdill, R.M. (1963a). Manual for the leader behavior description questionnaire-Form XII.

Columbus: Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University. Waldman, D.A., Bass, B.M., & Yammarino, F.J. (1988). Adding to leader-follower transactions:

The augmenting effect of charismatic leadership (ONR Tech. Rep. No. 3). Binghamton:

Center for Leadership Studies, State University of New York.