Impacts of a transactional leadership in a transformational change process

Abstract

Nowadays organizations have to deal with constant change and so it is very important to have leaders that are capable of conducting and maintaining organizational changes in an effective way and the style of leadership is a factor extremely relevant in this process. This paper analyses an intentional transformational organizational change - a change that aims to modify the organization as a whole - where the CEO demonstrates aspects of a transactional leader - one that emphasizes the standardized work and guided tasks. The literature review suggests that to achieve this type of change the leader should adopt a transformational style. The analysis of the change process led to the conclusion that its main objectives were not achieved and so this paper aims to study the influence of the leadership style in this failure. The results of this research agree with the organizational theory since it makes clear that the transactional leadership style has caused many problems in the organizational change process.