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Abstract. This paper examines Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech as an effective tool for teaching transformational leadership. Dr. King's speech provides an outstanding example of the transformational leadership process of identifying and articulating a vision. The speech and its historical context may help students to understand the importance of a strategic vision and its effective communication to followers. The paper provides an overview of the historical context of the speech along with an analysis of speech within the context of the transformational leadership model. Finally, we provide specific suggestions for using the speech as an effective teaching tool.
Keywords: Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream" speech, transformational leadership, vision.
1. Introduction
Effective leadership is a significant need in current organizations due to today's dynamic environments. While people have examined leadership from a variety of perspectives, the transformational leadership stream of research provides strong evidence of positive links between transformational leaders and organizational outcomes (e.g. Bass 1999; Fuller, Patterson, Hester & Stringer 1996, Judge & Piccolo 2004, Kearney & Geber, 2009, Herold, Fedor, Caldwell, & Liu 2008, Bass, Avolio, Jung, & Berson 2003, Kirkman, Chen, Farh, Chen, & Lowe 2009, Godwin & Neck 1998, Gong, Huang, & Farh 2009, Piccolo & Colquitt 2006). Researchers have examined a variety of dependent variables such as the positive relationships between transformational leadership and follower attitudes such as organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Fuller, et al. 1996, Lowe, Krock, & Sivasubrananian 1996). Given the significant support for the efficacy of transformational leadership, the purpose of this paper to examine Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech as an effective tool for teaching transformational leadership.
Dr. King's speech provides an excellent illustration of the core transformational leadership dimension of "identifying and articulating a vision" for followers (Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Moorman, & Fetter 1990, p. 112). The speech also may help students understand the importance of a strategic vision and the manner in which a leader can effectively communicate that vision to followers. We can learn from Dr. King how to better articulate a vision that leads to higher goal commitment among followers. We begin by providing an overview of the historical context of the speech. The next section contains the...