
Why do people follow you? To gain rewards and avoid punishments? To maintain a mutually-positive and useful relationship? Or do they follow you because they want to help you create a future they believe in?
Transformation involves transactions. It’s not possible or even desirable to ignore transactional forms of leadership. Likewise, not all transformational visions will actually lead to positive outcomes.
Balance is key. If you offer a compelling transformational vision WITHOUT any evidence that you can also offer something of concrete value, your followers may leave you for someone who can meet their transactional needs. If you offer something of concrete value to your followers WITHOUT evidence of any compelling transformational vision, your followers may leave you for someone who can meet their need for meaning transcending their transactional (material and interpersonal) needs.
—
As an historian, I used transformational/transactional leadership as a typology for the strategies the Hôjô family used to reshape the Japanese polity in the first half of the 13th century. The construct is also useful for analyzing modern political and corporate leadership strategies.
Transformational leaders don’t just offer an attractive compelling vision. They also analyze their diverse stakeholder relationships and then choose the right set of power bases and right mechanisms (level of leadership) to induce those diverse sets of potential followers to support them (or at least not effectively resist them).
Some do it consciously. Others do it instinctively. Leaders who don’t do this effectively rarely have a significant impact because almost all of the impact a leader creates comes through the actions of that leader’s diverse (willing and unwilling) followers.
—
Personally, I feel excited when I encounter a leader who lays out an attractive, compelling vision I aspire to join. At the same time, I need to feed my family this week, next week and the following week. Without financial rewards for my efforts I won’t have enough bandwidth to focus on the creation of that better world. This is supported by lower order transactions. I also need positive relationships with others. Without those relationships I won’t have the ability to feed my family or work through others to create that better world. This is supported through higher order transactions.
Who do you follow and why do you follow them?
What transformation are they leading you toward? What makes it attractive and compelling?
How do they meet your transactional needs to keep you with them long enough to realize the transformation that compels you to support them on the journey?
—
Graphic adapted from:
Kuhnert Karl W., and Philip Lewis. “Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Constructive/Developmental Analysis.” Academy of Management Review 12 (1987): 648-657.
French, John R. P. Jr., and Bertram Raven. “The Bases of Social Power.” In Studies in Social Power, edited by Dorwin Cartwright, pp. 150-167. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1959.
—
Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
To be a leader is to be followed. On what basis do we allow others to lead us?
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.