LEAD5653 Module 3 transformational and transactional leadership analysis example

Nine Thousand Lead Lines and One Overtime Bonus: Transformational and Transactional Leadership in a Single Utility Episode

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD5653: Leadership Theories, Frameworks, and Philosophies

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

July 17, 2028

The Episode

The composite municipal water utility followed in this course has about 9,000 service lines made of lead, the pipes that connect water mains to individual homes. Under a state mandate, it must replace them over ten years, which requires about 900 a year, three times its recent pace. The work is disruptive: each replacement means digging at the curb and often inside the home, which requires owners' permission, scheduling and trust. Early in the program, crews completed about 25 replacements a month, many homeowners did not respond to letters and the crews regarded the door-to-door work needed to get permission as someone else's job.

Over the next eight months, the operations director observed in earlier modules made two sets of changes. By the end of that period, crews were completing about 80 replacements a month, homeowner consent rates in the target neighborhoods had risen from about 40 to 75 percent and several crew members had volunteered for weekend outreach events. An episode that changes both a number and a culture is a good place to see which kind of leadership changed which.

The Transactional Actions

Bass (1985) distinguished transactional leadership, which motivates followers through exchanges of rewards for performance and through monitoring and correction, from transformational leadership, which raises followers' motivation by connecting work to higher purposes and developing followers. The director's first changes were transactional. With the general manager's approval, the director introduced a crew bonus of $150 for each completed replacement above a monthly base of 30 per crew, paid monthly, and posted each crew's count on a board in the yard. That is contingent reward, the core transactional behavior: a clear exchange of reward for defined performance.

The director also practiced active management by exception, reviewing every replacement's inspection report and returning to crews any with incomplete restoration or missing photographs, a form of monitoring that caught errors before homeowners complained. Within three months, replacements rose from about 25 to about 60 a month.

The Transformational Actions

The director's second set of changes was different in kind. At a meeting with all crews, the director explained why the program existed, describing the effects of lead exposure on young children and showing a map of the target neighborhoods with the locations of elementary schools and day care centers, and said that the utility's own grandchildren and neighbors lived in some of those houses. That is inspirational motivation, articulating a purpose that followers find meaningful. The director then asked the crews how to get more homeowners to say yes, rather than telling them. Their idea, a door-hanger with a crew member's photo and a direct phone number, followed by weekend neighborhood events with a crew present, was adopted. That is intellectual stimulation, inviting followers to question assumptions and solve problems.

The director also practiced individualized consideration, pairing a Spanish-speaking crew member with the outreach coordinator in neighborhoods where many owners spoke Spanish and arranging for a mechanic who wanted a supervisory path to lead one of the weekend events. And the director modeled the behavior, attending the first three weekend events in person, which crews mentioned repeatedly as the moment they believed the program mattered to management.

Which Style Produced Which Result

Research helps separate the effects. Judge and Piccolo (2004), in a meta-analysis comparing the two styles, found that transformational leadership had the highest overall validity across criteria, but that contingent reward was also strongly related to outcomes and, in some analyses, nearly as predictive; the two were highly correlated in practice. Wang et al. (2011), in a later meta-analysis of 117 samples, found that transformational leadership added predictive value beyond contingent reward for contextual performance, the helpful behaviors outside the formal job description, and for team performance, but not for individual task performance, where contingent reward explained additional variance.

The episode fits that pattern closely. The rise from 25 to about 60 replacements a month came in the three months after the bonus, before the transformational changes, and replacement is exactly the kind of countable individual task that contingent reward drives. But replacements were soon limited by consent, and the bonus did nothing for consent, since knocking on doors was not rewarded. The rise in consent from 40 to 75 percent, the weekend volunteering and the crews' ownership of outreach, all contextual behaviors no bonus specified, followed the transformational changes. The final rise from 60 to 80 replacements a month depended on both: consent supplied the addresses, and the bonus kept the crews moving through them.

How the Crews Described It

Short interviews with five crew members after the eighth month add texture. Three mentioned the bonus first when asked what changed, and two said it made the difference between treating replacements as one task among many and treating them as the priority. All five mentioned the neighborhood map and the director's presence at the weekend events, and none described those as the reason they worked faster. Instead, they described them as the reason they started caring whether a homeowner said yes. One crew leader put it plainly: the money was for the digging, and the map was for the knocking. The accounts support the analysis above, though they come from crew members who stayed with the program and may overstate its success.

What the Episode Teaches

The episode argues against treating the two styles as rivals. The transactional exchange produced fast, measurable gains in the part of the work that could be measured, and the transformational appeal produced the discretionary effort the program could not buy. Each had a limit the other covered. The bonus alone would have stalled at the consent bottleneck; the vision alone would have left crews moved but without a clear standard for daily output. Bass (1985) argued that transformational leadership augments transactional leadership rather than replacing it, and the utility's experience is an example.

The episode also shows a risk. Posting counts and paying per line could have encouraged shortcuts in restoration, which is why the director's inspections, a less celebrated transactional behavior, mattered. A leader who relies on incentives must also monitor what the incentives might distort.

Limits of This Analysis

The episode is a single case, and the timing that links the bonus to the early rise and the transformational changes to the later one could reflect other causes. The weather improved in spring, when the transformational changes began, and a new excavation contractor joined in month five. Consent rates might have risen as neighbors saw replacements completed nearby. The analysis cannot separate these effects with confidence. It can say that the pattern of results matches what the research on the two styles would predict, and that the director's use of both is more consistent with the evidence than a choice of one. A longer record, including whether consent rates hold once the director's attention moves elsewhere, would test the conclusion further.

References

Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. Free Press.

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Wang, G., Oh, I.-S., Courtright, S. H., & Colbert, A. E. (2011). Transformational leadership and performance across criteria and levels: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of research. Group & Organization Management, 36(2), 223-270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601111401017