The Study of Leadership and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire

“The study of leadership rivals in age the emergence of civilization, which shaped its leaders as much as it was shaped by them. From its infancy, the study of history has been the study of leaders- what they did and why they did it.”

(Bass,1990)

“..the transformational leader articulates the vision in a clear and appealing manner, explains how to attain the vision, acts confidently and optimistically, expresses confidence in the followers, emphasizes values with symbolic actions, leads by example, and empowers followers to achieve the vision (Yukl, 2002)

Yukl, G. (2002), Leadership in Organizations, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, .

Leadership is a topic of great importance not only in military or organisational settings but all most in all settings which involves people. It’s a universal activity evident in humankind (Bass,1990). It is a wide and diverse field of knowledge. Leaders are individuals who help their followers or subordinates to carry out a particular task in an efficient and an effective manner. Researches on the topic of leaders and leadership have been taking place for past many decades. One of the more recent styles of leadership which has been considered to be very effective is the transformational leadership. It’s a concept explained by James McGregor Burns in 1978 who was influenced by the work of German sociologist Max Weber. The concept was then further refined and developed by Bernard.M.Bass. The whole concept of transformational leadership talks about how leaders can transform their followers into doing a task better than what is expected from them and how it can help in the betterment of the organisation and the followers. The purpose...

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...s does not explain the leaders’ influence on the group tasks. Northouse(2007) has criticised on the clarity of the theory. He states that the theory is too wide and covers a range of factors that it does not give the complete parameters under the transformational leadership. The four factors of the transformational leadership were found to overlap often which showed that the four dimensions did not have borders (Tracey & Hinkin,1998). The problem of multi co linearity lower than desired reliability in MLQ was most commonly criticized by many researchers.

Hunt (1996) has criticised MLQ (Peter Warr)

The earlier versions of the MLQ were criticised that it measured the attributions and not the leaders’ behaviour. In response to this criticism, Bass and Avolio in the recent version of MLQ has divided the Idealised influenced factor into attributions and behaviour.