Transactional Leadership—A Rough Guide to Leadership Models and Theories

Transactional Leadership isn’t about changing the future. It’s about getting the job done. For the most part, it is a directive leadership style.

Directive behaviour is telling people what to do, how to do it, where to do it, and when to do it.

Furthermore, directive behaviour, as we learn from Hersey and Blanchard, is characterized by the close supervision of performance.

And this point is key to understanding Transactional Leadership theory and Transformational Leadership, which is the topic of the next post in this series.

Here’s why.

Features of the Transactional Leader

Transactional leaders use an exchange model, where they reward or punish performance according to the quality or quantity of work produced.