Leadership can be divided into two basic categories: transactional and transformative leadership. Transactional leadership uses rewards and recognition to encourage and motivate people to preform tasks and get jobs done. On the other hand, transformative leadership focuses on the positive feelings that one recieves when doing something that is bettering either their school or community. I believe that I fall into the category of a transformative leader. As a leader, I want to encourage those following me to do things because it is the right thing to do, not because they are recieving something for it. I think this enables people to become more emotionally involved and increases autonomy. As a leader, I do not want to be breathing down my followers backs in order to ensure that a job is being completed. Transformative leadership is a way to encourage self-motivation of others.
Although I support transformative leadership, I recognize that many people may not respond well to it at first. I think that in our society, we have become all too accustomed to receiving rewards and recognition for doing things well. When rewards and recognition have become a part of your daily life, it may be difficult or frustrating to part with them at first. However, as time goes on people will start to feel good about themselves and the job they are doing, and that will be better than any reward or recognition they could have received.
Christina,
ReplyDeleteThe reward system is something that I think about every day in the classroom. Some children will not try to participate in class discussions unless rewards are being offered. I understand that many people do not have that intrinsic motivation, therefore, they can not pass that value on to their children. As teachers, do you think that we should begin that process so that the children will learn to value accomplishments without rewards? As a future leaders, we will have face these questions and decide how to implement them. I believe in rewarding students, but not because they did something that is required of them anyway.