It is known that leadership is a type of management interaction based on the most effective combination of various sources of power for a given situation, aimed at encouraging people to achieve common goals. Strength and compulsion in leadership are often replaced by drive and excitement. As a result of the leadership approach, influence is based on people’s acceptance of the leader’s demands without explicit or direct exercise of power. The leader’s ability to influence people enables him to exercise the power and authority that is characteristic of modern military leadership.
In the world of business and in management science, transformational leadership is today considered the most effective style, and there is a certain situation of stagnation, “resting on laurels” due to the fact that the further development of leadership theory does not require fundamental improvements and significant modifications. However, practice shows that this style of leadership, in its currently applied form, is not always able to provide organizational excellence.
A number of disadvantages of transformational leadership can be noted – for example, results obtained in a number of studies have shown that the advantages of transformational leadership are often overestimated. In particular, in the context of its influence on the productive activities of employees, it does not always turn out to be more effective than transactional. This was supported by studies by Kahai et al. (2003), which examined the effects of different leadership styles on the creativity of e-brainstorming (EBS) participants. The results of these studies showed that in the context of the implementation of the transformational leadership style, EBS participants did not perform significantly better in the unusualness of the ideas they produced than in the context of transactional leadership (Kahai et al., 2003). Even more interesting results were obtained in the studies of Jaussi and Dionne (2003). In accordance with them, it turned out that the transformational leadership influence in some cases can even have a negative impact on the creativity of the subject in the context of both individual and group creativity (Jaussi & Dionne, 2003). Research carried out in this area shows that transformational leadership is more effective in stimulating the creativity of followers in cases where the group generating new ideas are as heterogeneous as possible in its composition (it has participants with different views, educational levels, professional interests, etc.), when direct contacts of the transformational leader with the generators of ideas at the moments of their creative activity are minimized. Moreover, transformational leadership can turn out to be completely ineffective when the focus on innovation is replaced by the exploitation of already known products and technologies for the sake of commercial gain or the interests of investors and higher-ranking executives.
Thus, there is a clear need to modify the styles of organizational leadership that are popular today – specifically, transformational leadership. In particular, military leadership, which develops much more dynamically than organizational leadership, can play an important role in overcoming the above deficiencies, which is due to the exceptional uncertainty of hostilities in modern conditions, the need to participate in hybrid wars, as well as the need for quick and effective training of the armed forces. The external and often internal environment of modern business, the need to take into account the diverse and even conflicting interests of stakeholders resemble hybrid warfare, but business leaders call this uncertainty, chaos, and entropy, instead of conducting an impartial analysis of the situation and working out the optimal situational solution.
Proposed References
Cullen, P., & Reichborn-Kjennerud, E. (2017). Understanding Hybrid Warfare. GOV.UK. Web.
Deloitte (2018). Leadership competency modeling: From competency to capability. Web.
Deloitte (2017). High-impact leadership. Web.
Jaussi, K. S., & Dionne, S. D. (2003). Leading for creativity: The role of unconventional leader behavior. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(4-5), 475–498. Web.
Kahai, S. S., Sosik, J. J., & Avolio, B. J. (2003). Effects of leadership style, anonymity, and rewards on creativity-relevant processes and outcomes in an electronic meeting system context. The Leadership Quarterly, 14(4-5), 499–524. Web.
Kiyosaki, R. T. (2015). 8 Lessons in military leadership for entrepreneurs. Plata Publishing.
Lin, S., Scott, B., & Matta, F. (2018). The dark side of transformational leader behaviors for leaders themselves: A conservation of resources perspective. The Academy of Management Journal, 62(5), 1-59.