Book Review

Abstract

There's a movement afoot in the social science approach to leadership. After decades of contingency models (cost-benefit formulations, as Bass calls them, based on contingent reinforcement) there is a trace of fresh air. Earlier harbingers of this shift were James MacGregor Bums whose 1978 book, Laadership, provided a lengthy discourse on transforma-tional vs. transactional leadership. About the same time, Peter Vaill was talking about "high performing systems" (1978), by which he meant groups or organizations that achieved inspirational excellence. Peters and Watennan (1982) found excellence, Bennis and Nanus (1985) found vision, Bob House (1977) found charisma. The drift of this movement seems to be that something special hap-pens in excellent organizations, something almost mystical or at least outside of our conventional variables. The behavior of people can't be explained by performance-reward linkages-they transcend them-selves, do more than is expected. The leaders don't just set goals, moni-tor performance, and dispense rewards: They are inspired and inspir-ing. It's about time we began to take these elusive and largely intangible Bernard Bass set out to understand transformational leadership, and has searched far and wide for insight. Drawing on Freud, political scien-tists, psychohistorians, as well as the more traditional motivational and leadership literatures, he attempts to build a model of the transforma-tional leader-the kind who engenders from others "performance be-yond expectations." According to Bass, there are four major factors comprising transfor-mational leadership: qualities seriously.