DO TRANSACTIONAL, TRANSFORMATIONAL AND SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP STYLES DISTINCT? : A CONCEPTUAL INSIGHT

Leadership is a critical element in ensuring the sustainability of an organization. Research in the field of leadership has never been saturated with theoretical and conceptual quests for leadership styles that work with any situation and followers’ condition. Bernard Bass, for instance has adopted the political leadership paradigm of transactional and transformational leadership styles introduced by Burn to the social science fields. Efforts by Bass were well accepted by other researchers and enormous studies have been done to test the applicability of the leadership paradigm in many sub-fields of social sciences for the past 30 years. Studies have found that transformational leadership style leads to increased productivity, employee morale, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. The findings also suggest that the latter compliments the transactional leadership style. However, recently scepticism was raised on the ability of the transformational leadership style to effectively fulfil follower’s inner need and with respect to the lack of spiritual element in the ethical conduct of leaders. Hence, this brings interest in research on a new leadership paradigm which takes into account the spiritual element in leadership. In spiritual leadership, questions are raised about what it means to be human, what we really mean by growth and what value and power distributions are needed to enhance both organizations and society as a whole. This paper attempts to investigate further these questions in the context of the various leadership styles mentioned. In due course, the results of a pilot study will be offered to support the argument