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Leadership is an important function for police managers. It is instructive to think of leadership in a series of functions. Police managers formulate and refine the organization's mission, goals, and objectives in terms of perceived needs. This requires the police managers handle departmental resources, motivate personnel to achieve goals and objectives, set a moral and professional tone, and create an environment for efficient, effective, and productive work (see More et al. , 2012, pp. 60-61). No one way to lead a policing organization exists. Burns (1978) presented two ways, however, that are available, for police managers to use, are transactional and transformational leadership.
Transactional leadership
Burns (1978) argues that individuals in an organization may be influenced and motivated by leaders. Burns (1978) outlines the leadership process two, theoretical, components: transformational and transactional leadership. Generally, each of these types of leadership has different ways to influence attitudes and motivation.
Burns (1978) idea of transactional leadership has its roots in social psychological social exchange theory. This form of leadership relies on the reciprocal and deterministic relationship between a leader and their subordinate(s) (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1981, 1985, 1997; Bass and Riggio, 2006; Judge and Piccolo, 2004). To clarify, leaders use a bargaining process with subordinates to motivate behavior. Utilizing relative positional power, the leader regulates the bargaining process so that benefits may be issued and received to continue positively valued behavior.
Transactional leadership is characterized in multiple ways. First, a transactional leader utilizes contingent rewards (e.g. work for pay or time off) to underlie the arrangements for explicit or implicit agreement on goals to be reached to obtain the desired rewards or behavior (Bass, 1981, 1985, 1997). Second, the transactional leader uses a management-by-exception format to implement a monitoring program that allows them to gather behavioral information to predict or prevent the subordinate from deviating from the agreed upon goals of objectives (Bass, 1981, 1985, 1997). Third, transactional leaders are generally passive and only take action when a problem arises (Judge and Piccolo, 2004).
Under this perspective, leaders and subordinates have considerable power and influence. The mutually beneficial exchange that takes place to obtain goals supports this view (Bass, 1981, 1985, 1997; Judge and Piccolo, 2004). Situations may arise where a leader being privy to vital information...