Unusually for a business framework, this one didn't start in business at all. James MacGregor Burns was a historian and political scientist who spent his career studying presidents and statesmen. In his 1978 book Leadership, he drew a famous distinction between transactional leadership, an exchange of effort for reward, and what he called transforming leadership, where leaders appeal to followers' moral values and raise both leader and follower to higher levels of motivation and purpose. For Burns, this was about Roosevelt and Gandhi more than regional sales directors.
It took an organisational psychologist, Bernard Bass, to bring the idea indoors. In his 1985 book Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, Bass extended Burns' concept, swapped "transforming" for "transformational", and crucially explained the psychological mechanisms underneath it and how it could be measured. Bass observed that followers of such leaders feel trust, admiration, loyalty and respect, and as a result willingly work harder than they originally expected to. Alongside Bruce Avolio, Bass developed the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), the instrument that turned an inspiring idea into forty years of testable science, and positioned transformational leadership within the Full Range Leadership model alongside transactional and laissez-faire styles.
A footnote the textbooks gloss over: scholars have since argued that Burns and Bass were never quite describing the same thing. Burns' version was deeply moral and political; Bass' version was organisational and measurable. The model the business world uses is firmly Bass'.
