You are here

Transformational Leadership

2 March, 2015 - 10:41
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/15788dd1-fbfc-4dbc-a85f-9c2b3f091728@1.2

Over the last twenty-five to thirty years, arrays of conceptual models have been employed in research of educational leadership. The 1990s brought leadership models that included shared leadership, site-based management, empowerment, and organizational learning (Hallinger, 2003). Transformational leadership has arguably been a predominant major approach and the backbone or base of these models. Within the area of education, Phillip Hallinger gives his refection of transformational leadership in the following statement (2003):

Transformational leadership focuses on developing the organization's capacity to innovate. Rather than focusing specifically on direct coordination, control, and supervision of curriculum and instruction, transformational leadership seeks to build the organization's capacity to select its purposes and to support the development of changes to practices of teaching and learning. Transformational leadership may be viewed as distributed in that it focuses on developing a shared vision and shared commitment to school change.

This statement coincides with Yukl's view of transformational leadership that points out; in essence, transformational leadership is a process of building commitment to organizational objectives and then empowering followers to accomplish those objectives (Yukl, 1998).