The article that focuses on transactional leadership says “Transactional Leadership focuses on results, conforms to the existing structure of an organization and measures success according to that organization’s system of rewards and penalties”. I decided to respond to this article because honestly transformational leadership still kind of confuses me. Transactional leadership is a lot more straightforward in my opinion, though it does still have its nuances. Transactional is basically exactly how it sounds, it is a transaction; I give you X so you give me Y. The article used Bill Gates as an example. Apparently, he was a bit of a jerk but his way of managing got results. He did not stand for dumb answers or ideas and focused on getting results and that is how he built Microsoft.
You can also look at people in the office to see a real-life example of transactional leadership. Today in class we talked about how people that we elect to power are transactional leaders. We give them money and our votes for them to fight for what we want. This is not always a good thing. One of my biggest complaints about congress is that large donors have too much power, the NRA for example. They give candidates lots of money in return for that candidate to fight for more lenient gun laws. Instead of fighting for what the people want, which is stricter gun laws and more background checks, congresswomen and men are choosing to support the current system because they get a lot of money from the NRA. This is a more negative form of transactional leadership just to demonstrate that there is no form of leadership that is perfect.
I think the reason why transformational leadership may confuse you is because it emphasizes the leader/ follower relationship in which leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. In this type of leadership, there is much more room for creativity and personal initiatives are more rewarded; meanwhile, transactional leadership is way more structured and therefore easier to understand
I really appreciated your example about the NRA; I think there are far too many companies and corporations in the United States who fall into a similar category. I think this is a great example which demonstrates that all types of leadership can be corrupt types of leadership and negatively impact both the leaders and the followers.
I think your comment about the negative aspects of transactional leadership is important in order for us to understand its complexities. In class, we learned that some view transactional leadership as more moral and ethical because it is straightforward and avoids persuasion, However, it is important to see all perspectives in order to understand the negative outcomes that, in this case, money can have on leadership.