Barking up the wrong tree. On the fallacies of the transformational leadership theory

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that the magnitude of interest in and of enthusiasm for transformational leadership is out of proportion with its weaknesses. Findings – The theory has some grave problems: there are conceptual limitations; managerial leadership is conflated with political leadership; the theory is presented as a universal as well as a contingency theory; the claim that transformational leaders are more effective is not empirically supported; and the use of the term “followers” rather than “subordinates” creates confusion in the study of formal organizations. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, does transformational leadership theory qualify as a managerial leadership theory? Research limitations/implications – Transformational leadership is a political leadership theory and thus less relevant for managerial leadership. Originality/value – This paper addresses the theoretical limitations of the transformational leadership theory as well as the lack of empirical support regarding the effectiveness of transformational leaders.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.