From "ought-ness" to "want-ness" and the role of transformational leaders

Leadership matters. Everybody knows that. Just take a walk in the city where you live and ask the people you meet if they think that leadership has any impact (positively or negatively) on the performance and wellbeing of people at work, in sports, at school, or in the family. Perhaps you will meet a few individuals that will let you know that leadership is totally overrated. They will surely be in minority though, as the vast majority of people have a view of leadership as something crucially important, for good or for worse.

The certainties with which they, with loud and clear voices, will share their point of views suggest that the common self-reported understanding of the meaning and importance of leadership is big. The fact is that it is a lot greater than the documented understanding of leadership held by most leadership and management researchers, who at least until the last two or three decades have had an astonishingly hard time to find systematic evidence of what constitutes good and effective leadership. As a matter of fact, these wise women and men have had difficulties to even agree about the pure definition of the term, which have resulted in the fact that there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are books and articles devoted to the issue.

If there is lack of consensus about the essence of leadership, it automatically also becomes difficult to agree on how to best practice it, not to say how best to learn and develop it. As leadership writer and researcher Richard Barker in a paper published in the scientific journal Human Relations said “How can we train leaders if we don’t know what leadership is?”.

Nevertheless, when scanning through the leadership and management literature some common themes emerges, regarding the definition of leadership. The most significant is that leadership is (or is concerned with):

• Social influence… (which basically means that one or more people is/are influenced to think, feel and act in a certain way as a result of the imagined or real presence or behaviour-/s of one or more people)
• …in a, given the present situation/context, desired way… (which basically means to do perform ones work tasks with good enough quality and quantity)
• …with a sense of volition/self-determination… (which basically means to do what you do because you want to do it, rather than because you feel that you have to do it)

Giving the above definition of leadership to people that are not dry academics like myself either renders an uppercut in solar plexus or, at best, an ironic smile. Therefore, a little more down to earth definition (although maybe a bit less scientifically stringent one) of leadership is as follows:

”A group of people are working on a task. The presence (real or imagined) and behaviours of a leader makes them work even harder and with better quality, not because they have to, but because they want to.”

Regardless if we use the first or the second definition, the simple fact is that leadership is about influencing other people, in a specific context, to act, think and feel in a certain and desired way.

Basically then, the whole idea of leadership is that one or more persons (formal or informal leaders), through their behaviours and pure presence, increase the probability that certain work tasks will be performed by others (i. e. followers) with better quality and quantity than would have been the case should the person/persons have not been present. Based on this view then, the main measure of leadership effectiveness is the objective performance of the people being led, which the first two points in the above definition (the boring one) is about.

A complete focus on the actual performance of followers unfortunately would leave a lot to ask for when talking about effective leadership. Objective performance constitutes only one (although probably the most important) of two important levels of the followers total work life interaction, namely the outer or external one (basically what one really does). The other central level is the inner or internal relationship that the followers have with their work, or as psychology professor Teresa Amabile from Harvard University calls it, the inner work life (which basically consist of the thoughts and feelings one has about and as a result of ones job). To simplify and hopefully make things a little bit easier to grasp, there are basically two ways of thinking and feeling about ones job. One could, to exemplify the first way, view the job (or certain work tasks within the total job description) as something that needs to or has to be done; something that one is forced or coerced to do. This is usually called to have an external, or controlled, work motivation and basically means that one performs certain tasks in order to receive or avoid something else (i. e. money, praise, self-esteem, punishments, guilt).

To exemplify the other way, one could think and feel about work as something that one wants to and freely chooses to do, either because it feels fun/stimulating or because it feels meaningful (with a strong and important purpose). This inner work life experience constitutes what we call an internal, or autonomous, work motivation and is found in the third point in the above definition of leadership (“…with a sense of volition/self-determination”). The reason that it is so important to talk about inner, as well as outer, work life is that internal/autonomous motivation in literally hundreds of scientific studies has been found to positively relate to and lead to the outer work life (better performance) as well as to more positive feelings (basically feeling happier). Briefly, as have been demonstrated in hundreds of scientific studies, internally/autonomously motivated people:

• Perform better
• Are less prone to leave the organisation
• Gets sick less often
• Are happier
• Have more satisfied customers
• Are more creative
• Cheat less

The best, and most effective leaders then, have an influence on other people such that they not only perform their tasks, but they also do it with an increased feeling of self-determination. These leaders are, in the leadership literature, called transformational leaders. Basically then, transformational leadership is about transforming people’s work motives from doing it because they have to do it to doing it because they want to do it, or in other words, going from a feeling of being controlled to a feeling of being autonomous and self-determined in ones behaviour. Transformational leadership constitutes the most effective form of leadership as supported by literally hundreds of scientific studies.

Transformational leadership is one of a number of leadership styles as described in the the Full Range of Leadership (FRL) theory (developed by prominent leadership researchers Bernard Bass and Bruce Avolio in the 80’s and 90’s) which is the leadership model that has been the subject of the vast majority of leadership studies the last two and a half decades.

Stefan Söderfjäll, Ph. D