What stood out to me most about the Burns reading was the contrast between transactional leadership and transformational leadership. I found this sentence especially meaningful: “Leadership, unlike naked power-wielding, is thus inseparable from followers’ needs and goals.” Both transactional and transformational leadership require this inseparability of leaders and followers, but in different ways. I was intrigued by the comparison; transformational leadership is clearly a more effective method of leadership.
Transactional leadership involves an exchange of things such as goods, it is not just simply to engage with others in order to boost morale and motivate, which is what a leader should be doing. Transactional leaders can easily have ulterior motives and be more interested in what they get out of the leadership as opposed to transformational leaders who only get higher levels of motivation and morality of their followers out of leadership. Clearly, if one of these two types of leaders were to be less sincere and less genuinely follow-oriented, it would be a transactional leader.
This being said, I think that this comparison is an effective method of comparing and contrasting various leader’s motivations and therefore their dedications and effectivenesses. Leadership is a very subjective field, but I think differentiating between transactional and transformational leaders is one manner of determining a leader’s effectiveness.
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