The “Unpleasant Present”
Transformational v. Transactional Leadership in the Digital World
The digital age has brought about change to the nature of leader-follower interactions. With the presence of Skype, Face Time, etc. employees can work from home and still attend conference calls and meetings in the workplace; such is the nature of my internship. I intern with a company in Virginia while residing in Maryland. Due to the fact that I can’t always be present at the company head quarters from day to day, my relationship with my boss is much different than the other employees. That being said, the form of leadership he exhibits with me is quite distinct. I chose to map out his leadership style using a Transformational v. Transactional Leadership template. While analyzing our calls and other digital interactions, I have come to see digital leadership metaphorically as an “unpleasant present”. I’ll explain what I mean by this in the paragraphs to come.
The nature of my internship excludes face to face interaction the majority of the time. Not having to go into work every day and having the freedom to complete tasks on my own time is nice, but it has its downsides. These downsides often arise in the communicative aspect of my internship. While my boss is kind, charismatic, and inclusive, his base leadership style is transactional. My boss and I have a beautiful surface level connection; however, my performance is judged on the basis of completion. Given that my internship is, for the most part, virtual, following his directions on how to complete certain tasks can be quite nebulous. Moreover, this becomes problematic because I feel like a bother constantly calling him for clarity. By bothering him too much, I risk deteriorating his liking for me. This is especially difficult when the task seems simple and easy to understand at first. Thus, the attractive simplicity of the tasks and the autonomy of the internship becomes crowded by the unpleasantness of ambiguity; an unpleasant present.
Conclusively, my boss displays transformational leadership strategies, but yields the results of a transactional leader. He is emotionally engaging and inclusive during conference calls with other employees, but views success as output rate, savings, and goal attainment. Consequently, myself and other virtual interns find ourselves stuck and unsure how to get ahead on some of the company’s tasks and goals. This isn’t a huge problem at the moment, but the virtual nature of the internship visibly impacts the effectiveness of my boss’ leadership strategies.
In some ways, this reads a bit more like a ‘theory in action’ reflection versus a ‘leader/follower relationship’ reflection if you look at the prompt for each. ‘Leader/Follower’ asks more about structure, how work is directed, how decisions are made, trust levels, etc. It does, however, also ask about leadership style, which is what you primarily focus on. (Do read the prompts and address items requested when writing.) I like the ‘unpleasant present’ – interesting notion. You talk about transactional and transformational here, but don’t really get into the various elements of each (transactional – contingent reward, management by exception, active and passive, etc. and transformational – idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration). Particularly when you do write your two ‘theory in action’ reflections, you’ll want to talk about the various elements. It sounds like task structure is relatively low here and that to some extent, since it is virtual, leader/member relations is relatively weak; given this, might be better to talk about contingency (as these are two of the three elements of contingency) and whether your supervisor is task or relationship oriented. But outside of all of the theoretical, it sounds challenging.