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Pablo Cardona: Assistant Professor, IESE International Graduate School of Management, University of Navarra, Spain
In recent years, the concept of transformational leadership has gained important support as well as some criticisms. The basic caveat to transformational leadership has been called the "Hitler problem" (Ciulla, 1995). Is Hitler a leader? Can he belong to the same category as Gandhi? Bass and Steidlmeier (1999) summarize some of these problems and propose a distinction between pseudo-transformational leaders and authentic transformational leaders. Pseudo-transformational leaders are ethically questioned because they appeal to emotions rather than to reason, and may manipulate followers' ignorance in order to push their own interests. Hitler or Saddam Hussein could be situated in such a category. On the other hand, authentic transformational leaders are engaged in the moral uplifting of their followers, share mutually rewarding visions of success, and empower them to transform those visions into realities. Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa are proposed as examples of this category.
In order to distinguish between these two types of transformational leaders it is necessary to refer to certain core values that the leader shows in action. "For transformational leadership to be 'authentic', it must incorporate a central core of moral values" (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999, p. 210). Even though Bass and Steidlmeier try to explain how certain values are found in all traditions and cultures, they fail to specify which are the concrete ones that we should look at and measure in order to distinguish the good transformational leader from the bad one. It is difficult to propose specific values without analyzing the dilemma between natural law and cultural relativism. In this paper I propose an alternative approach to solve this problem. This approach is based not on specific values that the leader must show, but rather on the influence that the leader's values and actions have on the relationship between leader and collaborator. Depending on the type of relationship the leader promotes, I will distinguish three types of leadership: transactional, transformational, and trascendental leadership.
Relational leadership and exchange theory
In the last 25 years, different theories of leadership have studied the relationship between leader and follower. One of these theories is the leader-member exchange theory (or LMX), initially described by Dansereau et al. (1975). In 1978,...