An approa ch bet ween the transfor mational Leaders hip and the theor y of communi cative action

Abstract

Since the seminal Burns’ work about transformational leadership, many other authors have argued that leaders are successful if they don’t behave like managers. As far as being an argument without theoretical basis, it is argued that the transformational leadership model can be considered from the point of view of more-complex theoretical social approaches, like for instance the Habermas’ theory of communicative action. This is the proposal of this paper, that, considering the dichotomy between the strategic action and the communicative action, analyzed the ontological foundations for distinguishing between managers and transformational leaders. In these lines, it is argued that the Theory of Communicative Action provides a critical analysis of the transformational leadership, since it permits a better comprehension of some of its elements, while it questions others, providing a less naive understanding about the leadership phenomenon, such that presented by the managerial view in the leadership studies. One of these contributions is the construal of the transformational leadership as a phenomenon contextualized by the freedom of the speech, propitiating the communicative action through organizational mechanisms that are free of communicative interaction constrains, allowing reciprocity among leadership agents.