Transformational Leadership Theory: Why Military Leaders are More Charismatic and Transformational?

Abstract

Military is an arm of government authorized to use lethal force and weapons, to support the Interests of the state and some or all of its citizens. Navy, Air force and Army are the branches of military which altogether form a huge group of people with diversified professionals and spending a good portion of the countrys GDP. Military leaders, therefore, are very important assets of the military. In order for military commanders to be good leaders, they are supposed to follow a strict path of training and practical experiments for quite long time while in services. The need for the military leaders to be more transformational has been publicly discoursed in recent years, the aim is to allow more transparency in balancing the public spending without affecting the military efficiency and readiness. Are charismatic and transformation traits contradicting? Why military always produces good leaders and which leadership style is best fit into military situation were the main exploration in this paper. The results showed that, charismatic and transformational are not contradicting but rather overlapping and in fact, charismatic is one of the important traits of the transformational leadership style. Progressive, sophisticated and expensive trainings together with indispensable powers given to the military commanders are the main factors which make them good leaders compared to other leaders at the same level. Finally, the paper concluded that, the choice of the leadership style in the military is the discretion of the leaders taking into account nature of tasks, people, resources available and time needed to accomplish the task.