We began by discussing the three-day-seminar in New York. The young chief executive explained to me what had happened.
‘The speaker outlined in his opening talk the difference between transactional leadership and transformational leadership. He referred to J MacGregor Burns as the author of this landmark in leadership theory, in his article Leadership (1978). You must have read it?’
‘I have certainly glanced through it. It’s a large article mainly about American political history, I seem to recall. I believe Burns was a professor at an American university in the field of politics or government. The phrase he actually used was transforming leadership. Later someone altered the phrase to transformational leadership, thereby subtly altering its meaning. Anyway, before we get onto that issue, what did the speaker have to say about transactional leadership?’
‘Very little,’ the young chief executive recollected, and checking through his notes he confirmed that had been the case. ‘Beyond the brief reference to it in the opening talk we heard nothing more about it over the next three days.’
‘Sounds rather as if it was no more than a straw man put up just in order to be quickly knocked down,’ I commented. ‘But the speaker must at least have told you what it was?’
‘Yes he did. Transactional leadership merely implies that some exchange of value in order to get things done, arrived at by a bargaining process, has taken place. Beyond this transaction there is no sense of mutual commitment to a continuing higher purpose. To me it sounded more like a description of management rather than of leadership. What do you think?’
‘It sounds as if the speaker was talking about a contractual relation where money is exchanged for labour. That entails a transaction – or a series of transactions – but it cannot be defined as leadership for it meets none of the necessary criteria we have been busy identifying. It appears to be a straightforward misuse of a term.’
‘So should we dismiss it as worthless?’
‘No, for most ideas have some value in them. It may be that the mistake was to contrast in a black-or-white, either/or way, the transactional element in human relations with the transforming or transformational element – whatever we discover this to be. In my view the transactional is the foundation on which the house rests. Did the speaker say anything about that?’
‘No, he was silent on that subject.’
‘Well, in that case it may be worth our while to explore this aspect of leadership for a moment. As I see it, reciprocity is a fairly fundamental principle in all human relations. To generalize, all human relations involve some form of give and take, a degree of mutual exchange. Reciprocity also implies the notion of an equal return or counteraction by each of two sides in relation to the other. If it’s mutual, then the same thing is given and taken on both sides. Mutual respect is a good example. A has respect for B, and B in return has respect in equal measure for A.’
The young chief executive reflected about some of the relations he had experienced, and how in some of them the balance between giving and receiving changed over time, so one person was giving more and the other person conversely was receiving more than they gave.
‘I notice you used the adjective equal, is that something we are born with or do we have to learn it?’ he asked.
‘Equivalence – the equal value of giving and taking – seems to be a guiding norm in human relations, which isn’t to say that it’s always the case. As you have just observed, few human relations have perfect symmetry in this respect; they may have it for a time, but time and change have a way of altering the balance. There is certainly a case for saying that our instinct for equivalent reciprocity is a matter of nature and nurture. I find it fascinating that in the first six months of a human baby’s life its mother hands objects to it and it takes them. Gradually the baby is encouraged to hand them back. By the time the baby is about 12 months’ old these exchanges involving giving and receiving have become more or less equal. The exchange of smiles probably follows the same pattern. Gorilla mothers and their babies do not follow this instinctive path.’
‘This must be the basis for bartering – the exchange of one commodity for another,’ observed the young chief executive.
We Cannot Live Only For Ourselves. A
Thousand Fibres Connect Us With Our
Fellow Human Beings;
And Among These Fibres, As Sympathetic
Threads, Our Actions Run As Causes, And
They Come Back To Us As Effects
Herman Melville