Actual and expected transactional and transformational leadership behaviors of project managers

Abstract

In order to ensure that construction team works toward the desired objective, it is important for a project manager to behave as an effective project team leader. This paper aims to investigate actual and expected leadership of project managers by comparing the transactional and transformational leadership behavior model. To accomplish the objective, the paper first briefly reviews the ways in which leadership, especially the two models, are approached. Data were collected through a survey to 63 construction team members in several ongoing projects in Indonesia. The results indicate that the project managers frequently use both transactional and transformational behaviors in leading their team, except the laissez-faire style. Results from analytical hierarchy process analyses interestingly show that the project team members expect the project managers to exhibit transformational leadership more than transactional leadership.