Motivation Towards Team Altruism: A Leader's Role

Running head: TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND ALTRUISM

Motivation Towards Team Altruism: A Leader’s Role

Gregory S. Davis

Capella University

Motivation towards team altruism: a leader’s role

     There is an abundance of both academic and practical research within the areas of transformational leadership and team altruism.  Transformational leadership according to Burke, Stagl, Klein, Cameron, Goodwin, Salas, and Halpin (2007), ties together the success of individuals and the focus on people.  Transformational leadership is the most researched leadership theme in today’s academia.  Like transformational leadership, there is a wide variety of historical and modern research on altruism.  According to Hu, Jia, and Linden (2015), altruism is “the desire to exert efforts to benefit others” (p.1102).  Further, altruism is the desire to benefit others, without the intention of benefiting oneself.

     The importance of being able to connect transformational leadership to a popular team practice like altruism, is of absolute importance in academic realms.  The connection between transformational leadership and altruism also has widespread real world implications where leadership and teamwork are valid ingredients.  Clear academic proof resonates within research that leadership has a direct influence on team member motivation and that altruistic tendencies within teams are a winning recipe within the workplace.  However, the synthesis of these two areas is absent in abundance in today’s current studies on leadership.

     Academic proof of a leader’s role in influencing teams is clear, though research is deficient correlating the traits of a transformational leader in development of altruistic teams.  Li, Kirkman and Porter (2014) highlight this absence arguing that work team study has primarily employed an approach focusing on egoism as the sole motivational factor.  Additionally, Cha, Schaubroeck, and Lam (2007) state that “despite the view of many scholars that leadership may have its most important consequences for teams; little research has focused on the relationship between successful teams and leaders, specifically transformational leaders” (p.1021).  In association with these findings, this review will focus on relevant and available research related to leadership, how it directly impacts altruism, and how the two in concert can lead to high performing teams.  The goal of this literature review is to support the main idea that transformational leadership and altruism are mutually beneficial to team success and that further study as a collective will benefit academia with further real world implications.

Leadership

     The field of leadership and its associated research from the behavioral perspective has flourished.  In fact, one review identified 65 classification systems of leader behavior proposed between 1940 and 1986 (Flieshman, Mumford, Zaccaro, Levin, & Hein., 1991).  Irving and Longbotham (2010) offer example of this expansive study in proceedings from the American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences.  Irving et al., identify six significant leadership themes, which with expanded analysis, pull data from two separate studies to reevaluate the model and ultimately provide three additional themes.  Moss and Barbuto (2010) offer similar example in examination of the effect of leadership.  They note that “The majority of practitioner-based books do not differentiate effective leadership from promotability” (Moss & Barbuto, 2010, p. 155).  In this case, promotabilitiy being a self-serving egotistical motivation, in sharp contrast to altruistic means.  This comparison is similar to other sources that, historically, management and leadership studies focus on promotion and egotistical motivators for how team management occurs.  

     What remains for the academic establishment is a synthesis of effective leadership traits, void of egoism, that offer an end state of developed and sustained altruistic teams.  In addition, altruistic teams that can successfully meet mission requirements.  Leadership in itself as a multi-level study occurs not just between leaders, but more importantly in this context between leaders and the team, or teams.  This highlights the importance a leader has in any team but specifically in the management of teams.  The question remains though as to which type of leadership theme, and more specifically what traits, offer the best direct positive relationship on team altruism.  

     Fleishman et al., (1991) in a Leadership Quarterly article divide leadership into two distinct themes.  Transactional leadership centers on task accomplishment and transformational leadership in contrast centers on people.  Transactional is often described at maintaining workplace normal and not rocking the proverbial boat, where comparatively, transformational leadership focuses on team building, collaboration, and change for the better.  There are many further comparative elements between transactional and transformational leadership, though these basic elements are the primary difference between these two most popular leadership themes available.  Because they are so widely studied the comparison of transformational and transactional leadership offers the best perspective for further analysis.

Transformational Leadership

     According to Singh and Krishman (2008) “Studies have empirically demonstrated that transformational leadership leads to higher levels of performance” (p. 262).  Transformational leadership takes the leader’s charisma and a trait commonly referred to as people skills and attempts to change the nature of an organization for the betterment of it.  Leaders take strong personalities and create a vision, promote it to subordinates through traits of selfless service, charismatic promotion of the leader’s ideals and taking care of the people within the organization.  Transformational leadership’s end state is about promoting vision and the goals of the unit or organization through role modeling.  Leadership and role modeling find haven in military societies and hence they offer a great example for original research and the applicability of transformational leadership and altruistic team success.

     Transformational leaders possess several keys traits that are beneficial to a wide range of workplaces.  Bass, Avolio, Jung and Berson (2007) first observed the positive effect of transformational leadership in study of U.S. Army leadership.  Ba et al., integrated previous leadership and team research to investigate the critical elements of leadership, cohesion and team potency of 72 Army platoons, with focus primarily on the two leaders within the platoon, the platoon sergeant (non-commissioned officer) and platoon leader (officer).  Bass et al. (2007) argue that transformational leadership “energizes groups to persist when conditions are unpredictable, difficult, and stressful” (p. 210).  Each of these conditions is commonplace in the life of military leaders, but also those in the civilian sector and within all management.  There are great implications for further study of transformational leadership due to the wide reaching impact for leaders in all areas.