Importance Of Transformational Leadership

Q1a. Explain why communicating the vision or mission of the organization is an important part of “transformational leadership”, and highlight how “communicating direction” would guide the behavior of employees for some greater purpose.

Transformational leadership is an ongoing process where the levels of morality and motivation of both leaders and followers are raised by one another (Burns, 1978). Bass and Avolio (1995) further defines that such leadership inspires followers to perform beyond limit to achieve the vision of the organisation.

Transformational leaders are often associated with four behaviours.

• Idealised influence whereby leaders serve as a role model for employees.

• Inspirational motivation where leaders show their commitment to goals and have a clear vision.

• Intellectual stimulation where leaders encourage creativity among employees.

• Individualised consideration whereby leaders offer their support and encouragement to individual employees.

Such behaviours are achieved when transformational leaders and the employees work as one. However, without a shared vision, transformational leadership cannot occur since there is no trust or motivation to help one another to achieve a common goal.

When asked, employees often have no idea what their boss does. In such situation, employees loses respect for their leaders. Employees need to see the big picture to help them understand the goals where their leaders are headed to. When leaders communicates the vision to the employees, they can appreciate the positive impact of the vision their leader tries to achieve. Hence, communicating the vision or mission of the organisation are important in transformational leadership.

With reference to the Maslow’s Hierarchy model (19...

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After the launch of the programme, demand for the programme grow. It was then they develop a “Fish!” train-the-trainer programme. This programme was to help leaders to use the Fish! Philosophy to ignite positive organizational change. It became leaders’ responsibility to bring the philosophy into their workplace to promote culture change. This in return achieves high levels of employee engagement and motivation and resulted in increased in teamwork, morale and trust among the employees.

An activity highlighted in the program is the playing of handbells. It is a teambuilding activity where a group of participants ring bells musically that becomes a challenge of coordination, precision and teamwork. In this activity, they wanted leader to believe the same positive experience can be multiplied powerfully on the team of each participant and at their workplace.