Critical Analysis of two Leadership Theories: Transactional and Transformational Theories

Leadership Theories
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Introduction
Organizational management is associated with strategies that help in increasing the level of productivity and the quality of services that the company or organization in question deals with. This means breaking down the various parts of the company organization, in light of business processes. Relative to the fact that this is a sensitive topic that managers have to deal with, management theories have received a fair amount of attention from the professional and academic quotas. Managers have the choice of using different theories to bring out the element of productivity. It is thus common for managers to bring about a mix of theories to implement and make the best of the productivity strategies. The two main categories of theories are transactional and the transformational theories. The transactional theory is attributed to Max weber and Bernard Bass and dates back to the 70s. This is a theory that is mostly focused on the organization, supervision, and largely performance. Leaders that use this theory are mostly looking make sure that their staffs are compliant with the basic rules and strategies laid out by the company, by using rewards for those that do follow and punishment for those staffs that negate from the same. In the case of the transformational theory, it is attributed to quite a number of authors some of whom are anonymous and it can also be traced back to the 70s (Smith, 2014). In the case of the transformational leader, as the title suggests, this is theory that is embedded on the premise that tasks at hand should motivate the staffs carrying them out. In this case the staffs are transformed as they carry out the various tasks. This means that leaders that are considered transformational or using the transformational leadership theory, tend to focus on the best strategies that help their staffs to be transformed through the activities that they partake in. as such, there are quite some very distinctive differences that can come out from critically evaluating and assessing the two theories (Bono & Judge, 2004).
Transactional leadership theory
Theory Overview
The transactional leadership theory is based on punishment and rewards. This means that the staffs are rewarded when they achieve their goals and punished when they do not get to their goals. Ideally, where a company sets specific standards to be achieved or observed, a manager that is using the transactional leadership theory, is more likely to reward the staffs that heed to the specifics of the standards and punish those that fail to observe the standards. One of the elements that comes out about the transactional theory is that, for the leaders that are using the theory, they are simply looking to make sure that there a certain level of compliance in their staffs. As such, transactional leaders are simply looking to make sure that things stay the same, such as culture, standards, ethics and values among other business aspects (Shivers, 1999). It is thus common to find that most of the leaders using this theory are going to concentrate much of their efforts on supervision, group performance and organization. By using the element of rewards and punishments, the transactio...