Leadership
requires the ability to not only develop new organizational functions to meet
market needs but also develop employee empowerment to create higher levels of
synergistic energy. When leadership creates innovation, an organization
continues to develop, invent, produce, and overcome market challenges.
Transformational leadership are seen as influential, inspirational,
motivational and humanistic (Avolio & Bass, 2002) and have the highest
chance of create great levels of change. The article below will highlight the
nature of transformational leadership and its impact on innovation within the
modern workplace.
It
is beneficial to understand what innovation looks like within the workplace.
Innovative work consists of 1.) Recognition of the problem, 2.) idea
generation, 3.) promotion, and 4.) realization (Janseen, 2000). Solving
problems in the organization creates higher levels of performance. The larger
the problem the more difficult it is people to become “tuned in” to the issues.
Thus, the components are often recognized in idea generation, the concept is
then promoted through concerted effort and finally a realization of the
solution is found once all the components have been understood and connected.
In terms of
leadership, such activities and behaviors are promoted within the workplace.
This includes the ability to think freely about concepts, experiment and fail.
Yet before employees will be able to use their intellectual capacities, they
should be prepared through higher skill development (Janssen, 2000). When
skills meet tacit and implicit management approval, the atmosphere can become
more conducive to change. Such change has the ability to create internal
corporate entrepreneurship that seeks to promote the self through
organizational achievement (Sharma & Chrisman, 1999).
The
transformational leadership style appears to be one of the most advantageous management
styles to encourage innovative work behavior among subordinates (Janssen,
2002). As a runner up to the transformation style in developing an innovative
workplace is the transactional leadership style. Such leaders focus on setting
objectives, monitoring and controlling outcomes (Avolio & Bass, 2002). Each
style promotes a level of accountability of results but does not overly control
the work process.
The best
leaders are like farmers who sprinkle their workers with inspiration and
motivation through self-development. They assist their subordinates through their
performance, abilities, and individual qualities by using motivational
inspiration that seeks improvement (Bass & Avio, 1990). When leaders take the preferred
transformational leadership style, they have been found through research to
increase work unit effectiveness by using innovation development (Judge and
Piccolo, 2004). This encouraging style furthers the development of higher
levels of personal achievement.
Modern
companies are not the only place that transformational leadership and
innovation are helpful. Governmental agencies, colleges, and schools are also
in need of change and hedging of human capital. Such transformational
leadership have been found to improve innovative work behavior in school,
colleges and universities (Abbas, 2010). At a time when universities have
become expensive and under the spotlight it is the transformational style and
the employees’ abilities that make a difference in their continued viability.
To
highlight the point of transformational leaderships strength over other
leadership styles a study conducted of 100 bank managers in Pakistan found how
effective the leadership styles of transformational, transactional, and Laissez
fair styles were in developing workplace innovation. The study used the
Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire at both public and private financial
institutions. It was found that transformational leadership was the strongest
in fostering innovation while transactional leadership ran a distant second
place (Khan, Aslam,& Rias, 2012. The laissez faire style was not correlated
strongly with innovation. Thus, transformational leadership was better suited
to fostering new ideas and problem solving on an organizational (Bass &
Avolio, 2000).
There are
many components that work to create the most effective and innovative
workplaces. However, leadership sets the tone of the workforce by encouraging
the development of human capacities. Other leadership styles have some
limitations through their behavioral modeling and control mechanisms that limit
the potential of employees. Innovation requires a level of free thinking, environmental
scanning, and experimentation that is difficult to achieve if strict procedures
or control based mechanisms are used heavily.
Abbas,
G. (2010). Relationship between
transformational leadership and innovative work behavior in educational institutions (Unpublished MS Thesis). Department of Psychology,
International Islamic University, Islamabad.
Avolio,
B., & Bass, B.(2002). Developing
potential across a full range of leadership: Cases on transactional and transformational
leadership. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bass,
B., & Avolio, B. (1990).
Multifactor leadership development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire.
Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologist
Press.
Janssen,
O. (2002). Transformationeel leiderschap en innovatief werkgedrag van
medewerkers: een kwestie van benaderbaarheid van de
leider. Gedrag
and Organisatie,
15, 275-293.
Judge,
T., & Piccolo, R. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A
meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 755-768.
Khan, M.,
Aslam, N. & Rias, M. (2012). Leadership Styles as Predictors of Innovative
Work Behavior. Pakistan Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 9
(2).
Sharma,
P., & Chrisman, J. (1999). Toward a reconciliation of the definitional
issues in the field of corporate entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship
Theory and Practice,
23(3), 11-27.
