The importance of the leader-follower relationship is captured in the ideas of transformational and transactional leadership. In his chapter, James Burns explains that pure power can be removed from the leader-follower relationship but leadership is not. I saw this as an explanation for the difference between charismatic leaders as opposed to toxic charismatic leaders. In Bass’ piece on transformational leadership, he explains, “charisma was too much associated with dictatorship and pseudo transformational leaders such as Huey Long, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler” (19). From this we can still define these leaders as toxically charismatic but maybe a better definition is one of pure power instead of leadership. Bass goes on to explain that abusive charismatic leaders do not exhibit the same “individualized consideration” as a socially concerned leader with regard to transformational leadership. I think this is a really important point that proves leadership cannot necessarily be defined with dichotomous terms. Leadership is a continuum where leaders can be different variations of charismatic, transformational, transactional, among other traits. That is why leadership is so hard to define. In fact Bass event admits that some of the best leaders are both transactional and transformational. Overall, I think the more we read about leadership and the more qualities we learn about, the more difficult it is to define leadership but the easier it is for us to understand that leadership is truly a study of people and history in their specific context rather than a bunch of definitions and criteria.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The importance of the leader-follower relationship is captured in the ideas of transformational and transactional leadership. In his chapter, James Burns explains that pure power…<\/p>\n