Leadership in the Pressure Cooker: Situational Transactional Leadership and Effectiveness

Transformational leadership typically produces positive follower outcomes and adds incremental variance above transactional leadership, also known as the augmentation effect. Consequently, research on leadership often involves transformational leadership and ignores transactional leadership. Recent evidence argues for the value of examining both transformational and transactional leadership behaviors, because studies involving these behaviors do not rigorously explore context factors including time, succession context, or organizational level. We aim to explore transactional leadership’s relationship to transformational leadership and how the effectiveness of these leadership styles may vary based on the situational context of the leadership activities. In doing so, we hope to make two contributions to leadership theory. First, we introduce a temporal element to the augmentation effect of transformational leadership, demonstrating that transactional leadership may be required prior to engaging in transformational leadership behaviors. Second, we argue that because of the augmentation effect, certain leadership contexts may be better-suited to transactional leadership than transformational leadership. We conclude with a theoretical model incorporating leadership, time, succession context, and organization level.