Transactional Leadership - Motivation Cure-All?

People are motivated by reward and punishment. This was one such consequence of Abraham Maslow's needs hierarchy. Group systems perform best through a clear chain of command. After people have contracted to do a task, a part of the arrangement is that they abandon complete authority to their boss. The chief function of a minion is to do what their boss tells them to do.

Transactional leaders operate by constructing clear algorithms by which they indicate clearly the expectations of subordinates, as well as the rewards received for meeting those expectations. Although punishment is not always explicated, the concept is implicitly understood, and systematic structures for discipline are usually extant.

In transactional leadership, negotiation of the contract defines the relationship. The contract needs to spell out salary and benefits, as well as what claim the company has on the employee and his work.

When an employee is assigned work by an transactional leader, the employee is fully responsible for the work, even if they do not have the competency or resources to do so. The employee is thought to be at fault when things do not work correctly, and must suffer the consequences of their failure. Likewise, success is rewarded.
The transactional leader often uses management by exception, working on the principle that if something is operating to defined (and hence expected) performance then it does not need attention. Exceptions to expectation require praise and reward for exceeding expectation, whilst some kind of corrective action is applied for performance below expectation.

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.

People are not simply driven by monetary rewards and cannot be assumed to be working examples of ideal rational individuals. Psychological theories that attempt to define and describe motivation and resulting actions are Pavlov's Classical Conditioning and Skinner's Operant Conditioning. These theories were devised using simplistic animal experiments and do not correctly model complex societal and human characteristics.

Using the Behaviorism to sustain Transitional approach proves true in a practical application, which is confirmed through supply and demand in the employment sector in addition to the effects of deeper needs like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. However, when the supply of employees isn't enough to meet the needs of demand, then Transactional Leadership is not sufficient; then other approaches prove more effective in the workplace.

Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Web Promotion. Read more Management Articles, learn about Abraham H. Maslow and the Maslow theory.