Leadership: A Case Study on Transactional and Transformational Leadership

This case study analyzes the leadership styles of Rachel and Tomas, and discusses the importance of servant leadership in organizations. Rachel's transactional leadership style is compared to Tomas' transformational leadership style. The article suggests that servant leadership is more effective in motivating employees and achieving organizational goals.

Running head: LEADERSHIP
LEADERSHIP
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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The manager named Rachel is ambitious and tries to pick up the best managers for her
team to give them lead roles. However, she makes them work more in comparison to the others
and hence it might create a pressure on the four people. However choosing of her as the four
main leaders would again demoralize the others as they might feel that they are discriminated.
Therefore, she was elective in her approach and was more engaged in selecting best members
than guiding the entire team to prepare for success. This was her negative aspect as a leader
should never discriminate among subordinates and motivate all people to achieve their goals. On
the other hand, Tomas was a much able leader as he had the strategy to identify the strengths of
each members and then accordingly allocate them to specific roles so that the best quality work
is achieved and the goal can be met easily. In that way all the members would be at the comfort
zone (Sonino, 2016). His plan to arrange day for the members to take part in activities also
ensured that team members communicated amongst them and develop bonding and trust that
ensure effective leadership.
Rachel is an example of transactional leader as she is more focused on maintaining the
normal flow of operations. Such leaders are seen to motive employees by exchanging rewards or
acknowledgements for performance. Therefore, it was seen that she was actually planning to
provide acknowledgement and reward the position of top leaders to the employees and in return,
she was expecting them to work much more than the others. She was more interested to make the
regular work go smoothly by choosing already skillful employees rather than transforming every
employee to achieve their best (Frankel, 2018). Tomas can be one of the examples of
transformational leadership. Here, actually with his strategy of trying to identify the skills of the
members, he also got the opportunity to help the employees develop a sense of bonding and
interaction with each other. Such leaders focus on motivation and inspiration and depend on

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team building and collaboration. They also lead by setting examples, communicate, and
considers with each individually to help the reach goals. Such attributes were noticed in Tomas
and so he could be stated as transformational leaders.
In this case study, Rachel should not try to select four important employees to make them
work more or to put pressure on them just because they are capable. Rather, she should help all
the members develop skills in ways by which all can participate and contribute to organization’s
visions. Servant leaders are not dictators but are more efficient in persuading the employees to
work beyond their potential and achieve the targets. Servant leadership is mainly based on
humility where they do not boast about their position or does not utilize their power by boasting
(Li et al., 2015). Rather she will be show humility that would help the employees feel that their
leaders understands them and genuinely feels about them. Moreover, empathy is another aspect
where leaders try to put herself in the shoes of the members which help her to understand their
barriers from their point of view and accordingly develops plan (Smith, 2015). Rachel should
develop the traits of servant leadership like valuing diverse opinions, cultivate a culture of trust,
develop other leaders, help people with life issues and encourage them to work for their targets.

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References:
Frankel, A., & PGCMS, R. (2018). What leadership styles should senior nurses
develop?. Practice, 10, 18.
Lin, P. Y., MacLennan, S., Hunt, N., & Cox, T. (2015). The influences of nursing
transformational leadership style on the quality of nurses’ working lives in Taiwan: a
cross-sectional quantitative study. BMC nursing, 14(1), 33.
Smith, C. (2015). Exemplary leadership: How style and culture predict organizational
outcomes. Nursing management, 46(3), 47-51.
Sonnino, R. E. (2016). Health care leadership development and training: progress and
pitfalls. Journal of healthcare leadership, 8, 19.