In the case of companies, top management has many ways through which they try to ensure that employees of the company keep working and there is no dearth of motivation, transactional leadership is one of those styles of leadership. In the case of transactional leadership, the leaders or managers of the company ensure that employees work hard by ensuring that the good work of employees is rewarded and the bad work of employees is punished so that employees remain under the control of the manager. In order to get a better idea about this style of leadership, one should read some of the important features of transactional leadership –
Characteristics of Transactional Leadership
Rewards and Punishments
The first and foremost feature of transactional leadership is that it tries to achieve the results by applying two principles one is rewarding those employees who are self-motivated and work hard and another principle is to punish those employees who are lethargic and unable to do their work on time. Besides these rewards and punishments are in monetary terms as this leadership assumes that employees are motivated by monetary reward and fear monetary loss when it comes to doing their job effectively and efficiently. In simple words, this leadership style is characterized by a rewards and punishments system set by the leader or manager rather than type and quality of work.
Lack of Personal Touch
Another characteristic of transactional leadership is that in this leadership there is a lack of personal touch from the leader or manager side towards the employees of the company as leaders or managers are more concerned about the completion of tasks allocated to them and the work of the manager is to give rewards for good work done by the employees and punish the bad work done by the employees without analyzing the reasons behind the bad work.
Transactional Leadership is Rigid and Goal Oriented
Transaction leadership is rigid in the sense that such leaders or managers are goal-oriented and have predetermined notions about the way of doing work and thus there is no scope for any creativity or adjustments resulting in workers working robotically without any scope of change in way of doing their work even if it leads to work getting completed quickly and effectively.
One Way Communication
In the case of transactional leadership there is no scope of two-way communication as workflow and order flow from top to bottom and due to fear of punishment no worker or employee has the guts to give suggestions or communicate with the leader or manager making the whole working environment a tense one. In simple words just like in the case of online classes if teachers keep talking without involving students then students will get bored and sleepy in the same way if workers are not allowed to communicate then they will get demotivated and frustrated with their manager or leader.
Transactional Leadership is Short-Sighted
The idea behind transactional leadership is to achieve short term success by creating an atmosphere of rewards and punishment system and thus its effects too are short term as in the long term if the company wants its employees to be happy and forever attached to them then they will have to give an environment where employee apart from monetary rewards gets love and recognition from the company.
Simplicity
In the case of transactional leadership, there is a simplicity which is involved because leaders or managers know that they have to reward the performers and punish the nonperformers and workers also know that if they achieve the goals given by managers then they will get rewards otherwise they will be punished thus making it easy for both employees as well managers to their work.
As one can see from the above that transactional leadership has some unique characteristics and that is the reason why any company thinking of implementing this style of management or leadership should carefully read the above points and then only should take any decision regarding the implementation of transactional leadership in the company.