Transformational Leadership Theory: Why Military Leaders Are More Charismatic and Transformational?

International Journal on Leadership, Volume 3, Issue1, April 2015

8 Pages Posted: 23 Feb 2017

See all articles by Hamad Hamad

Hamad Hamad

University of Greenwich, Students

Date Written: April 17, 2015

Abstract

Military is an arm of government authorised to use lethal force and weapons, to support the Interests of the state and some or all of its citizens. Navy, Air force and Army are the branches of military which altogether form a huge group of people with diversified professionals and spending a good portion of the country’s GDP. Military leaders, therefore, are very important assets of the military. In order for military commanders to be good leaders, they are supposed to follow a strict path of training and practical experiments for quite long time while in services. The need for the military leaders to be more transformational has been publicly discoursed in recent years; the aim is to allow more transparency in balancing the public spending without affecting the military efficiency and readiness. Are charismatic and transformation traits contradicting? Why military always produces good leaders and which leadership style is best fit into military situation were the main exploration in this paper. The results showed that, charismatic and transformational are not contradicting but rather overlapping and in fact, charismatic is one of the important traits of the transformational leadership style. Progressive, sophisticated and expensive trainings together with indispensable powers given to the military commanders are the main factors which make them good leaders compared to other leaders at the same level. Finally, the paper concluded that, the choice of the leadership style in the military is the discretion of the leaders taking into account nature of tasks, people, resources available and time needed to accomplish the task.

Keywords: Military, Transformational Leadership Theory, Charismatic Leadership Style, Transactional Leadership Style, Inspiration Motivation, Intellectual Simulation, Individual Consideration and Idealised Influence

JEL Classification: 015

Suggested Citation

Hamad, Hamad, Transformational Leadership Theory: Why Military Leaders Are More Charismatic and Transformational? (April 17, 2015). International Journal on Leadership, Volume 3, Issue1, April 2015, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2921153

Hamad Hamad (Contact Author)

University of Greenwich, Students ( email )

30 Park Row
Greenwich
London
United Kingdom

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
4,187
Abstract Views
15,918
Rank
5,193
PlumX Metrics