Transactional leadership is based on some sort of exchange. The leader seems as a boss of sorts, by giving rewards or even monitoring. This also seems to be more selfish, focused on some other goal, and not very effective communication between the two parties.Transformational leadership is built upon through engagement between the leader and follower. There is more of a bond built here. Both parties benefit intellectually, not only materialistically, from this sort of relationship. It is interesting that even this has a gender normality to is as well, women tend to practice transformational leadership more often than males.
It seems to me that transformational leadership is the one that we should all aspire to practice. It develops, as Bass states, the leader and the follower intellectually and morally. Although, it is also understandable where transactional leadership can be beneficial for the leader, the follower, and the relationship as a whole. Moreover, it seems that both are ways in which one leads and its important to separate leader from leadership as a whole so that we don’t just fit any one leader into these categorizes as both can be applicable depending on evaluated circumstances.
When you characterize transactional leadership to be a “selfish” style of leadership, I instantly thought of narcissism. Maybe transformational leadership has gender normality because of the continuous rise of feminism and the feminist movement. The entire movement serves to uplift women and to equate their values and purposes to those of men. So, it makes sense for women to identify more with transformational leadership because they have to lift each other up as the patriarchy would not normally/naturally do.
I think I wasn’t really surprised that there was a gender normality within the two types of leadership, but it was definitely something that I would not have thought about if it had not been mentioned in the article. I do think that transformational leadership is the way to go though because as stated, it works on developing the relationship between the leader and followers rather than trying to keep the two separate and only work towards some kind of reward as the end goal that benefits one more than the other.