Transactional leadership is a leadership style that focuses on supervision, organization, and performance. It fundamentally values structure and other, while also maximizes the supposed positive impacts or advantages of a rewards-and-punishment system to motivate followers.
Several situations make this leadership style ideal because of its inherent advantages or benefits. However, when compared with transformational leadership and in some scenarios, its disadvantages and limitations can affect the quality of leadership and the performance of a team.
The Advantages: Strengths of Transactional Leadership
1. A Simplified Approach to Leadership
Simplicity is a critical advantage of transactional leadership. This model is considerably straightforward because it focuses on a direct exchange process in which the transactional leader provides the rewards while the followers perform the expected tasks in exchange.
2. Focuses on the Basic Needs of Humans
Compared with a transformational leader, a transactional leader manages performances and motivates followers by satisfying their basic needs to include hierarchy include physiological needs such as food and shelter, as well as safety needs such as personal security, health and wellbeing, and financial security.
3. Appropriate for Specific Leadership Situations
It is effective in increasing the efficiency of conventional procedures, handling new chaotic organizations, and establishing and standardizing practices, processes, and behaviors. For existing organizations, the focus of the transactional style of leadership is to keep things the same.
The Disadvantages: Weaknesses of Transactional Leadership
1. Unsuitability of Transactional Leadership
There are individuals who cannot be motivated by meeting their basic needs alone. Once individuals have reached the basic levels of needs such as physiological and safety needs, they naturally pursue more advanced levels such as belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization.
2. Inflexible for Some Leadership Situations
A transactional approach to leadership is not suitable for situations that require strong collaborations among individuals. The straightforward exchange process utilized in this approach is not appropriate in organizations that require a complicated chain-of-command and more than one reporting line.
3. Promotes the Disadvantages of Authoritarian Leadership
These drawbacks include the inability to make the best decision because of lack of insights and inputs from different sources, the lack of feedback mechanism needed to make corrective changes, elimination of innovation, and too much dependence on the transactional leader.