by Amanda R. Dollak

Created on: August 30, 2010

In today's business world, the best companies are looking for strong, knowledgeable leaders who can rally the staff and press on doggedly despite the challenges of a weakened economy. However, these leaders are so often far and in between, simply because few individuals take the time to analyze their own personal leadership style and research the countless modes of leadership that exist to improve their own leadership skills. In the end, any individual can increase his/her effectiveness as a leader merely by familiarizing himself/herself with common styles of leadership and by remembering when and how these styles are most useful. To assist you in the development of your own personal leadership skills, I will outline three popular leadership modes: (1) transactional leadership, (2) participative leadership, and (3) visionary leadership.

Transactional Leadership

Since I am most familiar withtransactional leadership, I decided to begin my research with this leadership model. First, transactional leadership places most of the importance on the leader in the leader/follower relationship (Maslennikova, 2007). Essentially, transactional leadership is much like it sounds. Followers are lead through a continuous flow of transactions between leader and follower. Leaders communicate what they want and determine what it will take for their followers to meet these goals. All responsibilities are clearly stated and a standard set of rewards and punishments for fulfilling or failing in these duties is given, so every person will be doing exactly what is necessary to reach the set goals. As a result, transactional leadership works best with short-term endeavors or easy, everyday duties. This leadership mode has numerous advantages. However, one crucial advantage of transactional leadership is its clearly stated expectancies and its rewards/punishment system promote cohesiveness and efficiency within the workplace by preventing the majority of errors and employee inequality. Also, its rewards/punishment system can be an effective means to motivate employees since they continuously know exactly how their efforts in the workplace will be treated. Regardless of these advantages, however, transactional leadership has disadvantages. For instance, since this leadership model values employee compliance and a highly structured environment, it often cannot encourage employee creativity or innovation. Moreover, this employee compliance can further cause problems for an organization

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