Replying to LO26615 --
Dear Organlearners,
Felicia Stewart <ramropr@one.net.au> writes:
>What are the key connections between transformational-
>/transactional leader in organisational contexts? Does
>anyone have any ideas?
>
>I am trying to find out if leadership in the context of organisational
>change (i.e. restructuring, down sizing, etc) is distinguished from
>leadership in other organisational contexts (i.e. stability).
Greetings Felicia,
I think that mentally you will have to create for yourself all the
patterns which you are aware of.
I will try to create these patterns with phrases and sentences as I
understand them.
The organisation operates in an environment. Jan Smuts (father of holism)
would designate it as a whole and its field forming a greater whole.
Transformational/transactional leadership is focused on this
"whole+field". However, i will have to imbetter on it because of the
following.
Your explanation seems to tell me something else. The "restructuring, down
sizing", etc point to the field within the organisation. Thus it seems to
me that you are thinking of "whole"="leader+innerfield" where I mean with
"innerfield" the internal structures and processes of the organisation.
Consequently I will have to change the "whole+field" above into
"whole+outerfield". This "outerfield" involves all the structures and
processes in the environment.
Should I substitute the "whole" in "whole+outerfield" with
"whole"="leader+innerfield"
the result will be
"innerfield+leader+outerfield"
I consider this three-fold pattern as the associativity pattern of wholeness.
In other words, I have made the sum of three parts and as Jan Smuts
defined holism for the Oxford Dictionary, I arrived at wholeness which is
more than the sum of the parts.
I can now use this
"innerfield+leader+outerfield"
pattern to articualte an important difference between an OO (Ordinary
Organisation) and a LO (Learning Organisation). Let us think of the
pattern
"innerfield+person+outerfield".
I call the middle part of such a pattern the commuter. In other words,
the "person" is the commuter connecting the inside of an organisation
with its outside.
In an OO the "person" is restricted to the mangement team. The rest of the
employess resort under the "innerfield" as so often the term "human
recourses" tells us. But in the LO the "person" includes as ideal all the
members of the organisation from lowest to highest rank. Yes, there are
ranks in a LO, but the rank of a person does not determine whether that
person is a commuter or not. To progress towards this ideal, the LO has
five disciplines. But I want to stress even more that it has the
LO-dialogue. In this LO-dialogue every member of the LO learns endlessly
of the complexity of the pattern "innerfield+person+outerfield", namely
wholeness.
Felcia, I am aware that I have said little on
"transformational/transactional leader" on the one hand and "leader in
organisational context" on the other hand. I havs doen it on purpose
because so much of what has been wriiten on both (under a plethora of
topics) has little wholeness to it. I think it is better to get a better
understanding on wholeness. This will help you to distinguish the corn
from the chaff.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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