Hi everybody and welcome to the Chapter 4 video lecture. In the last chapter we were looking at approaches to leadership and we looked at four of the five approaches discussed in our textbook. In this chapter we'll look at the fifth one, the idea of transformational leadership. The best way to understand transformational leadership is to contrast it with transactional leadership. Note that these sound alike but they mean very different things. We can think of transactional leadership as the traditional form of leadership, where the leader is concerned with satisfying just some basic human needs of followers, such as the need for an income. Whereas transformational leadership is designed to satisfy some higher level human needs, like self-esteem. A useful tool for understanding the difference between transactional and transformational leadership is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This appears on page 100 of our textbook, and you may have seen it before in different classes. Maslow identified five categories of human needs and arranged them from lowest or most basic to the highest or most complex needs. Our basic needs are the first things we have to concern ourselves with to stay alive. Food, water, air. things like that. Once those very basic needs are satisfied, then we can think about some higher level needs. And you can see where we would move up the ladder as each level of needs becomes satisfied. We can't concern ourselves with the very highest level of needs like creativity if we're starving for food and water. So those basic needs always have to be met first, according to this theory. So tying this idea to leadership, we would say that transactional leaders are most concerned with satisfying those lower level needs. This is a traditional model of leadership where the leader assumes that followers are motivated by things like money or prizes or privileges that will ensure those lower level needs. Transformational leaders recognize that those lower level needs must be met. But they also concern themselves with the higher level needs of followers, such as feeling fulfilled in their work, being able to advance in their careers, feeling a sense of pride in their work, feeling that what they do is worthwhile. So helping followers move up to those higher levels in Maslow's hierarchy. So what qualities do transformational leaders have? When you mention transformational leadership, people will often cite examples like those given here. Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, people like that. And what they're doing is giving you examples. But if you try to define transformational leadership, it's a little more challenging. What we want to look at is what these people have in common. What are the characteristics of transformational leaders? And if you look at the top of page 102 in our textbook, You'll see a list of some things that transactional leaders focus on versus what transformational leaders focus on. So let's look at some of those things. Our authors tell us that transformational leaders tend to share certain characteristics, which I will list here and then cover in more detail in the slides coming up. Transformational leaders are creative. They are interactive. They are visionary, they are empowering, and they're passionate. So let's look at what these characteristics mean when they're specifically applied to leadership, or what would a leader do to demonstrate that they have these qualities. And we'll start with creative and go down the list. Creative leaders are able to make new combinations out of old ideas to meet new demands. We sometimes call this thinking outside the box. They study and read in their field. Continue to do deep thinking and letting ideas incubate in their minds, constantly revising the way they think about their work, and creative leaders take a problem-finding orientation. Which might sound kind of odd at first. Why would we look for problems? But a creative leader doesn't want to wait until problems arise to address issues that could be troublesome. The creative leader will constantly be looking at the work process and looking for places that problems could happen and try to address those before things go wrong. Transformational leaders are interactive. They're involved with their followers. Remember the relational approach we talked about in the last chapter. Transformational leaders want to employ those techniques. You cannot be remote. You need to be accessible to your followers and be willing to listen. Allow followers to share their ideas and insights. So the interactive leader is engaged in a relationship with the followers. We say that transformational leaders are visionary. They're able to communicate a vision. They have an idea of where they want to go and are able to communicate that sense of direction and purpose. They energize their people, help them create meaning from their work so they can see their work as meaningful, establish standards of excellence, and are able to bridge the present and the future. Talk about how we get from here to there. On pages 113 and 114 of our textbook, there's a list of vision statements of various companies. Many of these are quite good, and they will give you an idea of the sense of direction and purpose that visionary leadership entails. Transformational leaders are empowering. They are willing and able to make others feel powerful. They're willing to share power, give power away to help foster a sense of achievement in their followers. They encourage commitment and help their followers to take ownership of their jobs and to be invested in the outcomes. So transformational leader who's practicing empowerment isn't afraid of losing or diminishing their power by sharing it with others. And finally, transformational leaders are said to be passionate leaders. They have a commitment to their work, a love for their work. They encourage others because they are encouraged themselves. They have a true affection for their vocation and the people they work with. And these people will go above and beyond and don't consider it a hardship because they really love their work and they want others to love the work too. The next important idea in this chapter is charisma. And charisma is something we all think we know about, but it's really hard to define. We think of it as a person having a charm or a sense of presence, an X factor, a kind of personal appeal. So how can a leader develop that, or how can we identify a person who has that? Well, there are several perspectives on charisma or ways of looking at it that we can examine. One is the sociological approach, which I'll explain momentarily. One is the behavioral attribution approach. And one is the communication approach. And through looking at charisma through these three different lenses, we can start to kind of deconstruct what it means. The first of these approaches or lenses is called the sociological approach. And if you're employing this approach, you would look at charisma as a gift or talent or an extraordinary power that's kind of inherent, innate, God-given, if you will. That it's an X factor that some people have and some people don't. So you can identify it in people, but we can't really. tell you how to develop it if we're using this approach. The next approach we can take to understanding charisma, or we could say the next lens we can look through, is called the behavioral attribution approach. And this approach looks at charisma as something that is demonstrated through a set of behaviors. So if a leader demonstrates this set of behaviors, they are likely to be charismatic to their followers. And those behaviors are things like good, strong self-confidence, high expectations of oneself and of others. good relationships, like we talked about in the relational models in the prior chapter, and a strong sense of personal commitment to the followers and to the work. A leader who demonstrates this set of behaviors can have an appeal, a charm to their followers that we would call charisma. Now, this approach has an advantage over the last one in that this one is somewhat prescriptive. It kind of tells us what to do. And if we take care to develop these qualities and demonstrate these behaviors, we can improve our appeal to our followers. And the final approach that we could take to understanding charisma is called the communication approach. And this approach takes the view that charisma is a product of effective communication skills, which we can all improve upon and which is what we're trying to do in this course. This approach would suggest that a leader's command of rhetoric and persuasion can be very important in having charisma, their ability to link those symbols that we talked about earlier. to their goals and visions and having a talent for framing things. So there's a good example in the book. If there were going to be layoffs in the company, how do you frame that for your followers so that they will understand the reasons behind why it's happening and that it will be the least harmful to your followers and to your relationship with your followers? So to wrap up, we looked at transactional and transformational leadership. We looked at how transformational builds on transactional. The transformational leaders demonstrate a number of qualities, and transformational leaders often have strong charisma, and we looked at different ways of understanding charisma. So with that, it's time to go work on the task list like this very charismatic little friend here. And as always, if you have any questions or problems, shoot me an email and I will see you in the next module.