Business & Finance homework

Assignment : will be a summary of a journal article on ethical leadership in on in the Leadership Quarterly; . You may pick any article you wish to summarize, but you may wish to select one published during the last 5 years. Leadership research is consistently changing, and more recent articles may represent the better, or more current, research in the long tenure of leadership study . The name of the journal article, the author’s name, and publishing information, such as date and journal title, should be provided at the beginning of the paper. Provide a brief description of the research study and key findings. If it is a theoretical article, what is the key theory and the author’s major points? If it is an article describing the application of leadership in a particular setting, provide a brief description of the author and his/her main points. Your paper should be 4 pages long, typed double-spaced. Draw comparisons from Dr. Witherspoon's lecture below in connection to the text.

I will attach pdf document of the text

MLSX 5351, Week 2 Mini-Lecture: Transformational Leadership and Its Focus on Moral Leadership

Dr. Witherspoon

The Evolution of Transformational Leadership Theory

Theories of leadership grow and change like the people who embody them. “The Great Man” theories in the late 1800s and the early decades of the 20th century suggested that history is shaped by great men, that the progress of societies has been due to actions of those endowed with superior traits. Dowd wrote in in 1936 that “there is no such thing as leadership by the masses. The individuals in every society possess different degrees of intelligence, energy, and moral force, and in whatever direction the masses may be influenced to go, they are always led by the superior few.” (As quoted in Burns, pp. 37-38) This work followed assertions that great men tended to be of royal blood; kings and their brothers (princes) were leaders based on inheritance. They became the men of power and influence in their societies. (Catherine the Great and Elizabeth I, were not included in those studied.) Of course, the findings of these “researchers” were based on the individuals they selected for study! If you are only going to study kings and princes, your findings are going to be embodied in kings and princes.

The “Great Man” theories morphed into trait theories of leadership, which encompass the notion that all leaders share certain traits. There is considerable trait research which shows that people who are regarded as leaders do share certain traits, e.g. are high energy, sociable, intelligent, friendly, etc. However, in great part due to battleground experiences witnessed by officers in the two World Wars, military commanders, psychologists, historians, etc. began to write during the 20th century that traits don’t guarantee leadership…that it is how one manifests or uses those traits as behaviors that evidences leadership. In other words, “leadership” is not saying you are a leader; it is what you do to show you are a leader. And so a host of behavioral theories emerged in the leadership literature, which spans multiple fields and academic disciplines.

The Initial Discussion of Transformational Leadership

In 1978, Dr. James MacGregor Burns published Leadership, a book that was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A historian and a political scientist, Burns already had written a two-volume biography about Franklin Roosevelt that received multiple awards, including those he received for Leadership. He already had achieved acclaim for writing biographies of John F. Kennedy and Edward Kennedy and had authored a best-selling textbook on U. S. government and a volume on Congress. This book was different, however. It would be referred to over the next several decades beyond the fields of history and political science. His term, “transforming” or “transformational” leadership would be used by leadership scholars and practitioners. This mini-lecture uses several long quotations from the book itself, so you can see the author’s purpose and focus.

In the Prologue, Burns writes that he will focus on “transactional” and “transforming” leadership, beyond the notions of holding and wielding power. Transactional leadership is based on exchanges, e.g. paychecks for work, bonuses for extra hours of work, “jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions.” (p. 4) The transforming leader “looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.”(p. 4) Burns goes beyond the transactional notion of leadership and suggests the importance of “moral leadership,” and this is the notion that would later be left out of the writings of scholars in a variety of fields. He explains three components of “moral leadership:” 1) “leaders and led have a relationship not only of power but of mutual needs, aspirations, and values;” 2) “followers have adequate knowledge of alternative leaders and programs and the capacity to choose among those alternatives,” and 3) “leaders take responsibility for their commitments—if they promise certain kinds of economic, social, and political change, they assume leadership in the bringing about of that change.”(Ibid.) He emphasizes that moral leadership is not “mere preaching, or the uttering of pieties,” but the kind of leadership that produces social change and satisfies followers’ authentic needs, a leadership that “emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers.” (Ibid.)

Burns’ discussion of leadership includes observations on a host of leaders, both evil and benevolent. Good people can be transactional leaders. Transformational leadership, he writes, is elevating and moral and lifts people into their better selves. It is change leadership that is significant and sustained and depends on the collective and interactive relationship between leaders and followers. “The most dramatic test in modern democracies of the power of leaders to elevate followers and of followers to sustain leaders was the civil rights struggle in the United States,” Burns writes. (p. 455) “The battle was won at lunch counters, on highways, in classrooms, in front of courthouses by followers who had become leaders. On the other side of the globe, the pacific and egalitarian values taught by Mohandas Gandhi were proving to be an elevating force in an even harsher struggle for social justice.” (p. 455-456). As we know, Burns’ words are optimistic; the civil rights struggle in the U. S. continues. He ends his book with a continuing focus on moral leadership: “Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership and the moral and practical theme of this work.”(p. 462)

The Effect of Different Voices on the Notion of Transformational Leadership

Since the publication of, and attention to, Burns’ honored work, business and management scholars have applied his notion of the leadership of change into their own notions of transformational leadership, focusing on it as a theory guiding significant organizational change. Their applications came at a time of growing interest in leadership studies as a field, in organizations as sites of leadership, and in business schools and other disciplines as places where leadership has been taught and studied, e.g. business, management, communication, healthcare, to name some academic areas. In the study of organizational leadership, Noel Tichy, John Kotter, Bruce Avolio and Bernard Bass were some of the first individuals within business/management who applied various concepts of Burns’ seminal work to the study of transformational leadership in organizational settings….leadership which they identified as facilitating major, dramatic organizational change.

“We call these new leaders transformational leaders, for they must create

something new out of something old; out of an old vision, they must develop and communicate a new vision and get others not only to see the vision but also to commit themselves to it. Where transactional managers make only minor adjustments in the organization’s mission, structure and human resource management, transformational leaders not only make major changes in these three areas but they also evoke fundamental changes in the basic political and culture systems of the organization.” (Tichy, p. 59)

By the mid-1980s, discussions of transformational leadership in organizations often omitted reference to moral leadership and began to focus on such leadership as central to major organizational change. The term is used quite freely now as a theory of leadership, some scholars also suggesting it as a style of leadership. James MacGregor Burns became an international figure in the study of leadership and would eventually have a center named after him at the University of Maryland. He would stay true to his concept of what transforming leadership is, until he died in 2014 at the age of 95.

References

Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Dowd, J. (1936). Control in human societies. New York: Appleton-Century.

Tichy, N. (Fall, 1984). SMR Forum: The Leadership Challenge—A Call for the Transformational Leader. Sloan Management Review.