Impact of Vedic Worldview and Gunas on Transformational Leadership

Abstract

Thought processes, implicit assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes of leaders can be meaningfully studied only if they are interwoven into a composite whole by a cultural thread wherefrom they emanate. This study explores the personality traits and worldview of transformational leaders from an Indian cultural perspective. Indian philosophy provides a framework to help understand a person's mental make-up. It offers the Guna theory, also called the tri-dimensional personality theory, to explain differences across individuals. The Vedic texts also outline concepts like Karma (cause-effect chain or the basic law governing all actions) and Maya (existing bundle of inexplicable contradictions of the world) which help in comprehending a person's worldview. Only through a clear understanding of the leader's worldview can we unravel the secrets of transformational leadership and try enhancing it. This paper reports an experiment conducted to observe the impact of the different Gunas and the Vedic worldview on the magnitude of transformational leadership. There are three Gunas: Sattva (awareness), Rajas (dynamism), and Tamas (inertness). Gunas are fundamental ingredients or constituents in every being and each being is composed of all the three Gunas. When one of the three Gunas is dominant in a person, that person is characterized by that Guna. The Gunas were manipulated by portraying a political leader as being high on one or two of the Gunas. The Vedic worldview (operationalized as an understanding of Maya and belief in Karma) was manipulated by portraying the leader as having or not having such a worldview. The outcome variable was transformational leadership as perceived by the participants. The sample consisted of 140 students, 97 males and 43 females, aged between 16 and 20 years, from a prominent school in eastern India. A 3 x 2 + 1 factorial design was used where Sattva, Rajas, and Sattva-Rajas combinations were crossed with Vedic worldview (yes or no) to produce six cells, Tamas being the seventh cell. A 47-item multi- factor leadership questionnaire was used to capture the five factors of transformational leadership as perceived by the participants: attributed charisma idealized influence inspirational leadership intellectual stimulation individualized consideration. The mean of the five factors formed the transformational leadership score. The results of analyses of variance indicate the following: Sattva and Vedic worldview separately enhance transformational leadership whereas Tamas reduces it. Sattva-Rajas combination also enhances transforma-tional leadership but the effect is not more than the effect of Sattva alone. Sattva and Vedic worldview together do not enhance transformational leadership more than what Sattva alone does. The paper concludes with a discussion on what the organizations can do for enhancing transformational leadership by using the Guna framework and by reinforcing the Vedic worldview which are summarized as follows: Design training programmes to develop Sattva and reduce Tamas. Build team-orientation and self-sacrifice for directing energies towards superordinate goals. Base organizational policies on a competency framework built around Sattva and a Vedic orientation.