There is a distinction between managers who rely on their formal position and work mostly with bossy processes, such as planning, budgeting, organizing, and controlling, and leaders who rely on their personal abilities, visions, agendas, and coalition building and who mainly affect people’s feelings and thinking by non-coercive means. Most of managers have a personal and non-coercive influence beyond pure management, which combines elements of management and leadership. Management can get things done through others by the traditional activities of planning, organizing, monitoring, and controlling – without worrying too much what goes on inside people’s heads. Leadership, by contrast, is crucially concerned with what people are thinking and feeling and how they are to be linked to the environment to the entity and to the job.
Leadership process occurs in one of two ways, either transactional or transformational. Transactional Leadership is based on bossy authority and legitimacy within the organization. Transactional leaders emphasize work standards, assignments, and task-oriented goals. They also tend to focus on task completion and employee compliance and rely quite heavily on organizational rewards and punishments to influence employee performance.
Quite the opposite, Transformational Leadership is a process that motivates followers by pleasing to higher ideals and moral values. Transformational leaders must be able to define and coherent a vision for their organizations and the followers must accept the reliability of the leader.
