Abstract
Scholars who study transformational leadership (TL) typically promote it as a “style” of leadership that has little to do with top–down, authoritarian models of leadership that were prevalent in the past. For example, Bass and Bass (2008) identify intellectual stimulation as one of TL’s major components. Intellectual stimulation is conceptualized as the leader’s ability to empower, inspire, and stimulate followers to challenge assumptions, take risks, and be creative, including the ability and will to challenge the leader’s vision. Similarly, the individualized consideration principle proposes that the TL should provide support and empathy to followers and be attentive to their needs.
In The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective, Dennis Tourish, a scholar who has spent nearly his entire career studying various aspects of leadership, argues that despite these formal principles, TL is fundamentally authoritarian, empowering leaders while denying agency to subordinates. Written from a Critical Management Studies perspective, his goal is to reveal the dark underside of TL. Tourish’s approach is twofold. In the first part of the book, which consists of chapters 1–6, he builds his case that TL is far more authoritarian than its promoters seem to realize. In part 2, consisting of chapters 7–10, Tourish applies his alternative reading of TL principles to several case studies of what he regards as real transformational leaders in action, and the resulting damage done to followers and other societal stakeholders. The book concludes with chapter 11, which summarizes Tourish’s findings and offers some recommendations for future research into TL.
Part 1, titled “Leadership agency unraveled,” begins with an introductory chapter that explains the value of a critical perspective on TL. Tourish proposes that major societal upheavals, such as the great recession of 2007–2009, have likely been caused by the hubris of economic and political leaders who came to believe they could do no wrong, a hubris derived from TL ideology. Tourish argues that 21st-century society is characterized by a discourse that fetishizes leadership, exalting leader agency while regarding the ordinary person’s duty as to docilely follow those in positions of power. This in turn leads to a social–psychological climate in which leaders overestimate the wisdom of their judgments, and followers lose the will and ability to effectively critique leadership, resulting in major mistakes. This “fascination” with leadership exists not only in the broader society but in academic circles as well, as evidenced by the many works of business professors who extol TL as the cure for organizational ills. Tourish thus envisions his book as a kind of societal alarm-bell to alert us to the pitfalls of an overemphasis on leader agency. But Tourish also argues that critique is not enough: in order to be effective, the critical scholar must not only reveal the pitfalls of current leadership practices, he or she must offer viable alternatives to them as well.
In chapter 2, Tourish provides a brief overview of how TL has been conceptualized by academics, primarily via the extensive work of Bass and colleagues. He argues that TL’s emphasis on the leader’s “vision” results in a view of the leader as “super-human,” capable of insights beyond those of mere mortal followers. Taken to an extreme, this view of the proper relationship between leaders and followers can lead to cult-like behavior, and Tourish makes what he believes are several parallels between TL principles and cults. In chapter 3, Tourish focuses on what he believes is TL’s emphasis on coercive persuasion, defined as a means of linking “surveillance with intensive indoctrination.” Drawing on the work of postmodernist researchers, such as Barker, Willmott, and Foucault, Tourish argues that peer pressure techniques and corporate culture indoctrination efforts result in the creation of mostly docile, compliant followers who occasionally resist the dictates of leadership, but for the most part do what we are told. Chapter 4 takes aim at recent developments that link TL with an advocacy of spirituality and “servant leadership.” Tourish argues that while these concepts seemingly advocate a more reflective and humble approach to leadership, they actually reify leader omniscience because in the end, the guiding spiritual values are “to be defined, shaped, and implemented by managers” (p. 65) with little to no input from followers. The idea of leader omniscience is further developed in chapter 5 via a discussion of TL’s tendency to create silence in followers. TL’s emphasis on the leader articulating a vision is argued to induce followers to choose silence over voice, leading to an absence of upward-feedback from followers to leaders. Here, Tourish draws on more “mainstream” social–psychological research into the phenomena of ingratiation, groupthink, and self-efficacy to explain how a paucity of upward-feedback harms organizational decision-making processes. While Tourish isn’t entirely successful in arguing that TL is, in principle, hostile to robust channels of upward-feedback, the contrast between the mainstream work he draws on here and the critical-postmodern research drawn on in the previous chapter demonstrate his command of a wide breadth of leadership research. Finally, in chapter 6, Tourish concludes part 1 by discussing the harmful role of business schools in training their graduates in the principles of TL. He cites several examples of literature promoting various MBA programs as assuring enrollees about the school’s expertise in turning out leaders steeped in knowledge of TL principles. Tourish argues that business schools train leaders to rely only on their own judgment and to discount the perspective of lower-level employees, which he argues, is a root cause of the “hubris and narcissism” present in many corporate boardrooms, and the harmful decisions that emerge from them.
Part 2 of this book consists of four chapters which analyze several cases of corporate/organizational misbehavior as having been rooted in the application of TL principles. The most persuasive of these is the analysis of the Enron scandal (chapter 7). Here, Tourish is able to link TL principles to Enron’s ruthless corporate culture that exalted the wisdom of key executives, discouraged dissent from staff with technical knowledge of the energy market, and “engineered” employees who would subordinate their ethical values to the drive for corporate profits. In chapter 8, Tourish links TL to the decline of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), a Trotskyist British political movement that was active in the UK Labour Party during the 1970s and 1980s. This case is likely to be perceived as esoteric by most readers, but piqued my interest because it is an example of TL principles at work in a left-wing organization rather than large corporations, which are typically viewed as conservative in nature. However, while it is unsurprising that a far-left political party was characterized by a culture that insisted on unwavering devotion to a supreme-leader and brooked no internal dissent, it is harder to make the case that TL practices, rather than the inherently limited political appeal of a Trotskyist program, was the cause for the movement’s failure. In chapter 9, Tourish applies TL principles to disastrous outcomes in two other esoteric cases, those of the mass-suicides at Jonestown and the Heaven’s Gate cult. Tourish’s point seems to be that, when taken to an extreme, TL’s emphasis on follower devotion to a leader’s vision can literally lead to mass death. This conclusion is likely to strike some readers as an unrealistic application to leadership in corporations, as there are obvious situational factors that make cult-like environments different from work cultures. More compelling to students of business and leadership is Tourish’s linkage (chapter 10) of TL precepts to the behavior of top-level bankers in the United Kingdom and United States in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. Here, Tourish cites the testimony of these financial elites at parliamentary and congressional hearings to show that leaders who before the collapse had touted the efficacy of their wisdom and vision in leading their banks to big profits later changed their tune and claimed that the factors that led to the financial debacle were both unforeseeable and beyond their control. But, while Tourish’s account is valuable in highlighting the craven efforts of top bankers to avoid accountability for their actions, it is less successful in making the points of this book, since he does not establish a clear linkage between TL principles and these self-serving behaviors.
The strengths and weaknesses of The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership are on display in part 3, consisting of chapter 11, which attempts to offer solutions as to what kind of leadership we, as management scholars, should be promulgating to our students. This begins with yet more critique, as Tourish evaluates three approaches that have already been offered to ameliorate some of the perceived flaws of TL: servant leadership, followership theory, and Habermas’ concept of the ideal speech situation. Tourish rejects servant leadership as “decaffeinated” TL, because while it ostensibly posits the leader as meeting the needs of his or her followers, those followers are, in the end, supposed to accept the final judgment of the leader. Similarly, followership theory is critiqued because its leading exponents argue that a “good” follower is ultimately subservient to their leaders. Finally, Habermas’ conception of an ideal speech situation, in which every participant is given equal “voice” and the goal of decision-making processes is to achieve a consensus that satisfies every legitimate interest, is rejected as being unrealistic, since real organizations are rife with power imbalances that preclude equal participation, and stultifying, because Habermas seeks to end the need for dissent and resistance when from Tourish’s point of view these are productive of lively debate and hence should be encouraged not stamped out. Instead, Tourish draws on David Collinson’s work to argue for a dialectical approach that views leaders and followers as locked in a communicative process that, while rife with contradictions and conflicts of interest, can produce the kinds of dynamic exchanges that lead to positive organizational outcomes.
At its best, this chapter, like much of the book, is a near tour-de-force that highlights Tourish’s broad and deep command of the TL literature, which he leverages to creatively and imaginatively apply his ideas and those of others to critically illuminate a variety of leadership issues and situations in a manner that mainstream works have not heretofore been able to do. Unfortunately, chapter 11 is in a more practical sense less useful, because it draws on squishy concepts that strike me as nearly impossible to implement in practice. One problem is his advocacy of dialectical thought, which fatally posits that history moves in a positive direction, such that “things are getting better all of the time.” However, history has shown that sometimes, events take place that constitute real steps backward that may take years, or even longer than the spans of the lifetimes of people negatively affected, to overcome (e.g. the financial and mortgage crises of recent years that Tourish cites in the book). Also, the chapter lapses into postmodernist jargon that I found difficult to interpret. For example, in a penultimate part of the chapter, Tourish describes leadership as best viewed as a “communicatively organized, fluid process of co-ordination and co-construction between myriad organizational actors, whose ‘essence’ varies of necessity between each occasion of its occurrences” (p. 212), a description I found to be largely unintelligible. He then posits that one of the practical implications of this view is that
it needs to be accepted that leadership is inherently complex, contradictory, iterative, adaptive and contested … there are no universal set of competencies to adopt … and effectiveness, invariably elusive and transitory, is rooted in a profound appreciation for context … (p. 213)
What I derived from this is that leaders should fly by the seat of their pants, using their own intuition to determine what factors, including follower ideas, to allow to influence their decision making in any given situation. This approach may indeed be the best that management scholars can offer right now, but it is likely to be more empowering to managers than emancipating for followers. And intellectually, it harkens back to 1970s-era “contingency” theories of leadership, but sans a concrete specification of important situational factors that moderate the influence of leader actions on follower performance.
That said, I found The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective to be an interesting read. Although I am familiar with critical-leadership concepts (cf. Jaros, 2010), I learned a lot about the nuances of TL and how its principles have spread throughout business schools and management practice, and I found the argument that TL has a “dark side” that has not been adequately apprehended and appreciated to be convincing in the main despite some quibbles with specific examples. Thus, I can recommend this book for reading lists in MBA-level leadership, business ethics, and strategic management courses. From a research point of view, the book is a useful primer on TL and its limitations, though experts in this literature are probably already familiar with much of its content, since several chapters are reprints or re-workings of articles previously published in journals. But all others should derive quite a bit of value from the notion that TL, in theory and practice, requires a good bit of transformation, even if the author isn’t quite clear about the exact nature of that transformation.