Abstract:
It is said that, ‘Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion.’ Since the 1970s countless articles and books have been written about transformational leadership theory when it first appeared in the literature as a conjectural concept advanced by J.V. Downton and later popularized by James McGregor Burns. The purpose of this proposed paper is to illustrate that transformational leadership contains both logical and psychological problems when explaining the nature of leadership and as an empirically supportable and verifiable construct. Not the least of the empirical problems is a fundamental tautology in the construction of surveys purportedly to measure the transformation for as Imre Lakatos (1999) has observed that ‘a fact may not be used twice, first in the construction of a theory and subsequently in support of it.’
The proposed paper aims to show that transformational leadership’s failure to garner evidence from a scientific methodological analysis may not invalidate its efficacy if it is viewed from an alternative lens, such as aesthetics. An aesthetic frame is one that recognizes sensuous ways of knowing since feelings and emotions are just as important as reason and logic. An aesthetic approach to leadership would see leadership as more of an art than a science. This paper is not arguing for the abandonment of transformational leadership theory; rather it is proposing that an aesthetic lens is likely to yield a richer, more artistic, and more nuanced account of what is understood and enacted as transformational leadership as a global phenomenon. This way, the manifestations of transformational leadership may live on in the arts as a heuristic device to continue to understand the deeper nature of leadership.
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Lakatos, I. (1999). The methodology of scientific research programmes. in M. Motterlini (Ed.)For and against Method: Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The proposed paper aims to show that transformational leadership’s failure to garner evidence from a scientific methodological analysis may not invalidate its efficacy if it is viewed from an alternative lens, such as aesthetics. An aesthetic frame is one that recognizes sensuous ways of knowing since feelings and emotions are just as important as reason and logic. An aesthetic approach to leadership would see leadership as more of an art than a science. This paper is not arguing for the abandonment of transformational leadership theory; rather it is proposing that an aesthetic lens is likely to yield a richer, more artistic, and more nuanced account of what is understood and enacted as transformational leadership as a global phenomenon. This way, the manifestations of transformational leadership may live on in the arts as a heuristic device to continue to understand the deeper nature of leadership.
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Lakatos, I. (1999). The methodology of scientific research programmes. in M. Motterlini (Ed.)For and against Method: Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.