Background:
Leadership scholars recognize that the most successful leaders revitalize and transform their organizations. Accordingly, these leaders’ orientation is referred to as “transformational leadership”. Transformational leadership is perceived as a leadership approach that causes change in individuals and in groups. In its ideal form, it creates valuable and positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders. Enacted in its authentic form, transformational leadership enhances the motivation, morale and performance of followers through a variety of mechanisms. These include connecting the follower's sense of identity and self to the mission and the collective identity of the organization; being a role model for followers that inspires them; challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of followers, so the leader can align followers with tasks that optimize their performance.
Required Reading:
Carless, S. A., Wearing, A. J., & Mann, L. (2000) . A short measure of transformational leadership. Journal of Business and Psychology, 14, 389-405.
Assignment:
You are asked to read the article by Carless, Wearing, & Mann, L. (2000). Then after having a very clear idea about the meaning of the seven behavioral manifestations of transformational leadership, asses your transformational leadership score following these rules:
1) Give yourself a score on each of the seven dimensions between 1 (rarely or never) to 5 (very frequently).
2) Sum up your scores and divide them by 7 to get your average score on the scale.
3) Ask someone who knows you well (preferably someone who works with you) to rate your leadership behavior on the scale and calculate the average score.
4) Compare the results obtained by yourself and your friend/peer.
5) What do you think about your scores on that scale? Are they high/low? What does it say about your leadership style?
6) Based on the results you obtained, on what aspect of your leadership behavior you think you should focus to improve your leadership style? How this might translate into actual behaviors at the workplace? What might be the results of such an improvement?
It is really important that you get a second opinion about your leadership behavior from someone who knows you, preferably in the work context. If for some reason you can't get a second opinion as part of this exercise, be sure that you explain well why it's not possible. Just ignoring this part of the exercise will cost you part of a grade.
Your paper should be short (2-3 pages, not including the cover sheet, references, and assessment sheet) and to the point. You are expected to deal with these issues in an integrated fashion, rather than treating them as a series of individual questions to be answered one by one and left at that.