Transformational leadership and the fundamental option for self-transcendence

Originally, transforming leadership was presented as moral leadership, developmentally raising both leader and follower in a common pursuit of end-values, and compared to transactional leadership, which altered followers' behaviors and attitudes in pursuit of self-interest based in modal-values. Subsequent theoretical development has focused on a change leadership not necessarily related to a change toward higher values. Although the concept of moral leadership must be expanded to include both transformational and transactional factors, this still does not take into account the reality of a leader who effects the retardation or reversal of the developmental process in followers. The premise of this paper is that the leader's orientation toward self and others must be taken into account in order to understand fully the leadership dynamic. A framework for consideration of this orientation is therefore proposed, based upon the concept of a fundamental option, or stable choice, for either self-transcendence or self-embeddedness.