3.3.5: Advantages of Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is associated with significant benefits or advantages over other leadership styles. These benefits include.

Workers or employees always come and go, and when this happens, staff costs are involved in terms of hiring, training, and deployment. For this reason, transformational leadership seeks to retain staff and talent by creating a more engaged and freer environment. Employee retention is significantly enhanced in organizations practicing transformational leadership. The same applies to valued customers and other stakeholders which is key to a successful business transformation. Since transformational leaders satisfy both the company and own needs simultaneously, workers feel at home and hold on longer. This keeps staff turnover and related costs low for the organization.

Passion is inner self drive of an individual or rather self-motivation. Transformational leaders create excitement which is catchy to followers as they are seen by followers being happy and having a good time.

Transformational leadership creates an environment which encourages creativity and a culture of trying new ways of doing things. This makes workers more creative and innovative as they seek solutions to various organizational problems and challenges. Compared to transactional leadership which loads workers with already made decisions with the leaders solving all problems, it is easier for transformational leadership to promote collaboration between workers themselves and their leaders.

Transformational leadership aims to change a company’s values to include high levels of fairness and justice. This leadership encourages good values and morals in conduct of business and work. This is about doing the right thing in the right way all the time whether one is under watch or not. Transformational leadership creates an open and ethical environment because the transformational leader who is also a role model is morally driven.

Impact of Transformational Leadership

Several studies have shown that there is significant relationship between the leadership that is exercised and organizational effectiveness. Similarly, there is significant relationship between leadership effectiveness and leadership behavior. This implies that with other factors held constant, the success of an organization is a function of the type of leadership in place.

Managers use different leadership behavior in performance of their roles which directly affects employees and thus their performance. Adequate use of leadership behavior often leads to higher employee satisfaction, employee commitment to work and organizational objectives, and improvement of their overall productivity. Therefore, effective use of leadership behavior improves the effectiveness of the leader and the organization.

In this context leadership outcomes refer to factors like group performance, realization of group goals, survival of the group, preparedness of the group, ability of the group to manage crises, satisfaction of subordinates with the leader, commitment to group goals by followers, psychological wellbeing, group members individual and group development, and retention of status of the leader in the group. On the other hand, organizational performance refers to the attainment of expected or desirable performance in terms of performance objectives and indicators. They include gross sales, profit margins, sales growth versus sales targets, net profits, productivity, unit production costs and many other quantitative and qualitative performance parameters.

Transformational leaders in business, are often experienced professionals and their leadership style is visible for all to see since the organizations and followers are made visible to the public. They are often remembered for turning around loss making organizations to profitability or transforming ideas and concepts to successful business enterprises. They are also adored by the people they interact with, i.e., followers, subordinates, and other company stakeholders. Through innovations and positive impact on followers and stakeholders, Michael Joseph is remembered and admired, and in fact at the end of his contract with Safaricom, he still retained as a non-executive director. In South Africa, Mandela remains an icon who ruled for just one term and left unlike other African leaders who have been clinging to power for many years. Mandela is fondly remembered as Madiba, by South Africans. For Michael Joseph, his success at Safaricom made him highly sought by his own organization and the public. For this reason, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya saw him as the ultimate choice for leadership of Kenya Airways which was experiencing turbulence in operations making huge losses. In Kenya, his name features in social circles when people are talking about Safaricom, and Mpesa mobile money service. Therefore, successful transformational leaders tend to continue to influence their former organizations both directly and indirectly many years after they exit.

Conclusion

Transformational leaders are regarded as visionaries, catalysts, motivators, goal oriented and futuristic leaders who work by invoking improved culture, shared vision and group respect, by the followers. The eight attributes which make transformational leaders successful are self-knowledge, flexibility, vision, charisma, expertise, authenticity, and ability to inspire others and ability to motivate followers. This implies that transformational leadership is a process that changes and transforms followers and treats them as full human beings. A transformational leader influences followers and moves them to accomplish beyond expectation.

Transformational leadership is the most preferred leadership style whenever organizations undergo tremendous or complex changes. Such changes include mergers and acquisitions, entry into new markets and environments, rapid change in business environment like entry of new and stiff competition that calls for new way of thinking and doing things. Transformational leadership has proved to be effective in delivering better outcomes by helping to enhance the work of followers and can be adequately described along five dimensions of vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition. For successful transformational leadership, the leader must have a clear and inspirational vision for the organization and the team’s future which should define the purpose of the organization and team members because it is relevant to the business and its mission. It may be necessary to incorporate the core values for followers and their capabilities and due regard to the limitations and weaknesses facing individual team members and the organization as a whole. Based on this, the transformational leaders will help followers to effectively contribute to the set vision for the organization through various support tools and systems like training, technology, and general empowerment. In the performance of the duty, a successful transformational leader has to motivate followers, set and work towards clear goals with high standards of performance and expectations, should be fair, honest , appreciate the team, for their individual, joint and team effort, encourage the employees to look at the greater good of the company and avoid self-interests to make followers challenge themselves and realize their best potential for the good of the team and organization.

Transformational leadership is said to be realized whenever a leader performs the duties effectively in a way that earns trust, respect, loyalty and appreciation from followers and stakeholders. Transformational leadership is leadership that causes change in individuals and social systems. Through their actions and behavior, transformational leaders create valuable and positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders themselves through influence and role modelling. Strategies used in the transformation include connection of the follower’s sense of identity and self, to the vision, mission and the collective duty and aspirations of the organization; role modelling; challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work, and proper understanding the abilities and limitations of the followers as individuals and team and aligning them with tasks for optimal performance. By so doing, transformational leaders lead followers to levels they may never reach on their own.

Transformational leadership seems to be the most dynamic under various circumstances, as demonstrated by identified transformational leaders like Michael Joseph, Bill Gates, and others in private and public business, politics, and social life.A transformational leader is a coach, mentor, innovator, enterprising, and visionary and motivator and can be found in private and public sectors as entrepreneurs or executives as well as politicians. To perform their role successfully, transformational leaders should be ethical in conduct, be risk takers but make well informed and researched decisions not mere guesswork and are future and sustainability oriented in their decisions. The study concludes that, transformational leadership style has weaknesses and strengths, but recommends it as the best style for organizations to realize desired change while maintaining an outlook and sustainable progress and existence as opposed to short term intentions as in project management and transactional leadership whose goals are quick and externally imposed of influence by the leader through measures like rewards, force, and fixed targets. The success of a transformational leadership however depends on goodwill and cooperation between followers and leaders which may not be the case in all circumstances or prevailing internal and external environmental factors, thus the need to pursue other leadership styles or a combination.¹⁰

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¹⁰Barasa, J. and Olanrewaju, A. (2024)