Carrot Or Stick? Transactional Leadership Shows The Way

People are motivated via reward in addition to penalty. This was one such outcome of the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Social structures perform most effectively through an unambiguous hierarchy. When individuals have agreed to do a task, One aspect of the exchange is that they surrender complete authority to their supervisor. The prime objective of a minion is to do what their supervisor instructs them to do.

The person in charge of the transaction works on creating clear structures, therefore making it apparent to employees exactly what is required, in addition to the rewards corresponding with following those requirements. Penalty is usually not explicitly declared, but generally understood, with recognized regulation practices in existence.

Discussing the agreement where the subordinate is given an income and other remuneration, and the company (and by inference the worker's supervisor) acquires power over the worker is handled early period of Transactional Leadership.

When the Transactional Leader allocates work to a subordinate, they are considered to be fully responsible for it, whether or not they have the resources or capability to carry it out. When things go wrong, then the subordinate is considered to be personally at fault, and is punished for their failure (just as they are rewarded for succeeding).
The transactional leader usually leads with the philosophy that if things are going smoothly and working at acceptable levels of success, they don't need to be addressed. Performance that goes above and beyond the expected standard is of course commended, while poor behavior is given some type of punishment and/or corrective measure.

Whereas Transformational Leadership has more of a 'selling' style, Transactional Leadership, once the contract is in place, takes a 'telling' style. Transactional leadership is based in contingency, in that reward or punishment is contingent upon performance.

Though a good amount of research indicates the shortcomings of Transactional Leadership, it remains a popular approach to management for many. In fact, it is clearly toward the management end of the scale of the Leadership vs. Management spectrum.

To have an effective model of human behavior, we can't assume that people are mainly motivated by reward and are very predictable. This fallacy is supported by the psychological theory of behaviorism, which was made famous by Pavlov's classical conditioning and Skinner's operant conditioning experiments. Unfortunately, these experiments are often performed in controlled lab conditions using animals as subjects, negating the complexity of the human mind and motive.

Practically speaking, Behaviorism sounds quite reasonable to keep up methodologies involving transactions, which in turn is armored by the supply-and-demand situation of much employment, chained with the results of greater demands, as the theory of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs suggests. When the demand for a skill outruns the supply, transaction leadership becomes insufficient, making other such approaches highly recommended.

Daiv Russell is a marketing and management consultant with Envision Web Marketing. Read more Articles about Small Business Management, learn about Maslow and Maslows hierarchy of needs.

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