Comparing and Contrasting Traditional Leadership Theories with Contemporary Leadership Styles and Traits

4.1 Transformational Leadership

The transformational leadership model is one of the most effective theories in the workplace today. It is defined as an approach to leadership that aims at bringing about changes in individuals and social systems. The transformational leader possesses four key traits: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration (Bass and Riggio, 2006). Ideally, a transformational leader tries to create valuable and positive changes in the followers with the aim of grooming the followers to become future leaders. Therefore, it combines motivation, morale, and performance of the followers by appealing to their sense of identity and self to the mission and the company’s collective identity (Bass and Riggio, 2006). As a result, the transformational leader fosters strong relationships in the workplace, serves as an ideal influence to staff members, motivates employees, encourages them to learn and stimulates creativity, and reduces employee turnover. The team’s overall performance is optimised since the employees are aligned with tasks, and their morale is boosted as well (Dionne et al., 2004). Despite these benefits, transformational leadership is limited by several factors. One of the core limitations is that it has restricted applicability in specific cases since it is not a one-size-fits-all leadership style. According to Gupta and Krishnan (2004), its applicability and effectiveness depend on the cultural context of the leadership situation. In other cases, the style leads to unnecessarily high pressure on followers, especially if the leader employs an authoritarian approach.

4.2 Servant Leadership

The second theory that will be examined in this section is referred to as servant leadership. It is a leadership style and philosophy where the leader interacts with others to achieve authority instead of power and ensure optimal performance. The primary concern of the leader is ensuring the growth and well-being of people and employees (Dennis et al., 2010). As opposed to simply compelling employees to perform in a certain manner, the leader serves as the servant. This revolutionary leadership approach puts employees at the top of the hierarchy while the leaders are at the bottom serving the employees. The serve-first mentality adopted by these leaders acts as a means of empowering and uplifting employees. Therefore, rather than commanding, they serve; instead of asserting their authority, they show humility and oversee the development of their employees (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Such an approach is beneficial since it encourages employees to be their best, and therefore, the overall performance of teams is high. Additionally, it encourages employees to show empathy and grooms other employees into leaders since they are motivated to serve others as well (Dennis et al., 2010). The team’s morale is also optimally high, which allows them to perform well. Nonetheless, this approach to leadership is limited by factors like the fact that it takes more time to build servant leadership since the team members must be engaged, and the leader needs to take time to learn how to engage them. Apart from that, teams can easily lose sight of the goal under such circumstances, a factor that may be aggravated when teams are working remotely. The role of the leaders is also less as the leader may not want to conflict or appear overbearing over the team members.

4.3 Comparison of Temporary to Contemporary Leadership Theories

The first contemporary leadership theory explored in this report is the transformational leadership style, and considerable contrast can be drawn from traditional leadership theory. One of the key contrasts that can be drawn from transformational leadership is that it does not prescribe any specific traits of a leader as compared to theories like the trait theory. To some extent, transformational leaders apply contingency/situational leadership skills to the extent that they act depending on their context. This means that before the transformational leader makes the decision, especially regarding the management or motivation of employees, they assess their context to ensure that the final decision is optimal (Dionne et al., 2004). In fact, transformational leadership skills and attributes, including fostering strong relationships in the workplace, serves as an ideal influence on staff members, motivating employees, encouraging them to learn, and stimulating creativity can be applied depending on the specific context (Watson, 2007). The context, in this case, is that the employees are working from home, and the typical rules that define the on-site workplace do not apply, me