transcendentalleadership

Transcendental Leadership

A stream of research has focused on differentiating transformational from transactional leaders (1). The Ohio State studies, Fiedler’s model, and path–goal theory describe transactional leaders, who guide their followers toward established goals by clarifying role and task requirements. Transformational leaders inspire followers to transcend their self-interests for the good of the organization and can have an extraordinary effect on their followers. Andrea Jung at Avon, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, and Jim McNerney of Boeing are all transformational leaders. They pay attention to the concerns and needs of individual followers; they change followers’ awareness of issues by helping them look at old problems in new ways; and they excite and inspire followers to put out extra effort to achieve group goals (2).

In recent years transformational leadership has been beset by a few problems or deficiencies, such as by the ``Hitler problem'': is Hitler a transformational leader the same way as Gandhi or Mother Teresa? How can we distinguish leaders from manipulators? Transcendental leadership adds to the transformational one a service orientation, in addition to its ethical characteristic, which solves the possible manipulative side of some transformational leaders.

Juan Antonio Pérez López (1934–1996) was a Spanish business theorist. He was professor of Organizational Behavior at the IESE Business School (University of Navarra), where he became Dean (1978–1984). Pérez López was a contemporary of Leonardo Polo, whose transcendental anthropology described the human person as an “open and free system”, which means to say that he naturally tends towards self-gift, and his growth as a human being is a function of this. In other words, the person’s being takes precedence over his having: his having should be given over to a love for and service to others, for this is the very essence of his personal being, which is free and donal (Polo, 1997).

Having been influenced somehow by Polo, Pérez López (1993) had proposed three main activities that managers must carry out, adding leadership capacity to the already extant strategic capacity and executive capacity. Leadership capacity in the thought of Pérez López has to do with what he calls transcendent motives (different from the extrinsic and intrinsic motives which is usual in the management literature) which refer to a genuine interest in the development and motives of the other person that goes beyond considering exclusively future effectiveness. These refer to the importance that each person gives to the influence that one’s actions and decisions can exert on other people, that is to say, the transcendent motives reflect the value given to the repercussions of one’s decisions on others (Vélaz and Pastoriza, 2003). In turn, such transcendent motives at work in a leader bring about a transcendental leadership defined by a relationship of personal influence, in which interactions take place through extrinsic, intrinsic, as well as transcendent motives.

We said above that transcendental leadership is a mission-based leadership, i.e., it is a leadership based on not just a specific external mission but a values-laden INTERNAL MISSION, which is the intent to satisfy an entire gamut of needs, including AFFECTIVE needs, apart from material and cognitive needs, and which includes the intent to make everyone--oneself and the people one leads--VIRTUOUS.

Thus, a truly strategic leadership is one which is based on transcendent motives which in turn carries a MISSION of SERVICE to others, of fulfilling all their needs, including their need for integral human development.

The best way of creating transcendental leadership is by example. “When governance has the texture of service it calls for a like response from those governed”' (Block, 1993, p. 22). Thus, the most important competence of transcendental leaders—besides their capacity to negotiate and control transactions, and their capacity to create and communicate a vision—is their integrity and capacity to sacrifice themselves in the service of their collaborators, even at the expense of their own interests.

Footnotes:

(1) See, for instance, B. M. Bass, B. J. Avolio, D. I. Jung, and Y. Berson, “Predicting Unit Performance by Assessing Transformational and Transactional Leadership,” Journal of Applied Psychology (April 2003), pp. 207–218; and T. A. Judge and R. F. Piccolo, “Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-Analytic Test of Their Relative Validity,” Journal of Applied Psychology (October 2004), pp. 755–768.

(2) Robbins, S. and Judge, T. (2013). Organizational Behavior. 15^th Ed. New York: Pearson.

--o--o--o--o--o--

"The transcendental leader, as well as being interested in the results and in aligning the motivations of his or her collaborators with those of the organization, also tries to develop the transcendent motivation of these people. The transcendental leader centers his or her managerial work on the needs of the collaborators but not in a manipulative way, i.e., in order to win their trust in such a way that they are more disposed to want what the leader wants. Instead, the transcendental leader is concerned with the people themselves and tries to contribute to their personal development, i.e., to their human flourishing, or eudaimonia. Specifically he or she tries to develop the collaborator's transcendent motivation: the motivation to do things for others, the motivation to contribute. Transcendental leaders are not so concerned about the collaborator's buying-in their vision, as they are to reach-out to their collaborators' needs and development."

--o--o--o--o--o--

Questions?

Email:

aliza.racelis@up.edu.ph

--o--o--o--o--o--