What’s wrong with authentic transformational leadership?
Sverre Spoelstra, University of Lund
Within leadership literature, in management and business especially, it is hard to distinguish between leadership theory that seeks to understand an actual social phenomenon (‘leadership’) and theory that seeks to intervene in social reality itself. Calder (1977) even went as far as arguing that concept of leadership do not capture social phenomena that cannot be explained through other concepts. True or not, concepts of leadership are demonstrably used to attain certain effects in social reality, particularly in business environments. In this sense we might at the very least say that leadership constructs are needed to explain that part of social reality to which they themselves give rise. One may also put it as follows: if leadership is defined as framing and defining the reality of others (Smircich and Morgan, 1982), the creation of a concept of leadership can itself be said to be an act of leadership.
In this paper I explore the effects of Bernard M. Bass’ (1985) introduction of the concept of transformational leadership in the context of business and management. More in particular, I shall discuss the ways in which transformational leadership is placed within an ethical framework by linkage to the concept of authenticity. By effectively arguing that ‘authentic’ business leaders are the moral equivalent of the Gandhi’s and Mandela’s of this world, Bass and others fuel actual business leaders with a comforting but false sense of moral superiority. In short: where Bass and Steidlmeier (1999: 182) argue that authentic transformational leadership is rooted in the grounding worldview of the leader, my aim in this paper is to question the worldview underpinning the concept of transformational leadership itself by discussing some of the consequences towards which the literature on transformational leadership is likely to give rise.
References
Bass, B.M. (1985) Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.
Bass, B.M. and P. Steidlmeier (1999) ‘Ethics, Character, and Authentic Transformational Leadership Behavior’ The Leadership Quarterly, 10(2): 181-217.
Calder, B.J. (1977) ‘An Attribution Theory of Leadership’, in B.J. Calder, B.M. Shaw and G.R. Slancik New Directions in Organizational Behavior. Chicago: St. Clair.
Smircich, L. and G. Morgan (1982) ‘Leadership: The Management of Meaning’ Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18(3): 257-273.