Book Review

Morgan W McCall, Jr.

Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, by Bernard M. Bass.

New York: The Free Press, 1985, 191 pp. $26.50.
There's a movement afoot in the social science approach to leadership.
After decades of contingency models (cost-benefit formulations, as Bass
calls them, based on contingent reinforcement) there is a trace of fresh
air. Earlier harbingers of this shift were James MacGregor Burns whose
1978 book. Leadership, provided a lengthy discourse on transformational vs. transactional leadership. About the same time, Peter Vaill was
talking about "high performing systems" (1978), by which he meant
groups or organizations that achieved inspirational excellence. Peters
and Waterman (1982) found excellence, Bennis and Nanus (1985) found
vision. Bob House (1977) found charisma.
The drift of this movement seems to be that something special happens in excellent organizations, something almost mystical or at least
outside of our conventional variables. The behavior of people can't be
explained by performance-reward linkagesthey transcend themselves, do more than is expected. The leaders don't just set goals, monitor performance, and dispense rewards: They are inspired and inspiring. It's about time we began to take these elusive and largely intangible
qualities seriously.
Bernard Bass set out to understand transformational leadership, and
has searched far and wide for insight. Drawing on Freud, political scientists, psychohistorians, as well as the more traditional motivational and
leadership literatures, he attempts to build a model of the transformational leaderthe kind who engenders from others "performance beyond expectations."
According to Bass, there are four major factors comprising transformational leadership:
1. Charisma"Charismatic leaders have insight into the needs, values, and hopes of their followers. They have the ability to build on
these needs, values, and hopes through dramatic and persuasive
words and actions."
2. Inspirational leadership"
A subfactor within charismatic
leadership behavior" in which "nonintellectual, emotional qualities" are used to arouse and heighten motivation among followers.
Most charismatics are inspirational, but one need not be charismatic to inspire.

Human Resource Management, Fall 1986, Vol. 25, Number 3, Pp. 481-4M
Ij 1986 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
CCC 0090-4848/86/030481-04$04.00

3. Individualized considerationPaying "attention to each of their

subordinates, sharing their concerns and development needs, and
treating them as individuals."
4. Intellectual stimulation"
The arousal and change in followers
of problem awareness and problem solving, of thought and imagination, and of beliefs and values
"
Bass describes each of these factors in detail, reviewing the relevant
literature, describing the processes involved, examining their antecedents, and providing guru-like examples (Iacocca, Roosevelt, Kennedy).
These transformational qualities are then contrasted with the characteristics of transactional leadership (two factors: first, use of contingent
reward, and second, management-by-exception, negative feedback, and
contingent aversive reinforcement). Transactional leaders are "
more
concerned with efficient processes than with substantive ideas. They are
more interested in what will work rather than in what is true."
Bass argues that transformational qualities are not restricted to a few
great heroes, but can be present to varying degrees in a wide variety of
people and places. And, while transformational leaders can be powerful
forces for positive change, the same qualities may be used in sinister
ways.
Emergence of transformational leadership depends, according to
Bass, on external environment (more likely in times of distress or
change), the internal organizational environment ("organic" organizations are more likely to see it), and the personality and values of the
leader.
The interplay of all these components is not as simple as this brief
review implies. There are 15 schematic diagrams in the book summarizing the hypothesized relationships among elementsa total of about
175 boxes containing one or more variables. In spite of this complexity,
there is a decided white hat/black hat tone to the book: Transformational
leaders are more proactive, moral, innovative, flexible, etc., than their
mundane transactional colleagues. While "the ordinary manager
is
kept busy with his inner id-superego struggles.
., fitting into the
mold, not making waves, defending his turf
" the transformational
leader is out there changing the organizational culture. It worries me
that the difference is so stark, especially since I don't think Bass intends
it to be. Perhaps that's the inevitable result of using historical giants as
examples: It's hard for most of us to relate to George Patton or John
Kennedy. The point perhaps is that the capacity for leadership of a
higher order is more widely distributed than we might believe. Part of
the problem is that we too easily accept manipulation of goals and rewards as the essence of leadership.
The book itself is an interesting set of contradictions. On the one
hand, its core is based on factor analytic studies of survey data. On the
other hand, it relies heavily on clinical analyses, including psychohistor-

482 / Human Resource Management, Fall 1986

ian interpretations of the personality and motives of historical figures.

At times the book is extremely thorough, reading like an academic review of the literature. At other times it's superficial, for example, dividing managers into stereotypical categories like "profit maximizers,"
"trustee oriented managers," and "quality of life management." At one
point, Bass slams the work of Peters and Waterman ("Their popular
style and selective interviewing suggests that they appear to have found
what they went looking for"), yet at various points in the book folklore
about companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, leaders like Iacocca and
Jobs, and even the Peters and Waterman findings are used to make his
own case.
One of the strengths of this particular framework is its empirical base.
In the style of a murder mystery, the reader is continually frustrated by
allusions to an answer, but "who dunnit" is not revealed until the last
two chapters. Here we find the details of a series of studies based on
convenience samples of MBA students, social science students, undergraduates, educational administrators, military students and officers,
managers and professionals in New Zealand, and managers from a U.S.
corporation who filled out various questionnaires. The method is neither good nor bad, it is simply one of our time, but it symbolizes the
major weakness of this book. There is little "feel" for what it's like to be
a managertransformational or otherwisein a real organization. In
this sense the concepts presented are abstractions in the academic tradition that seem disconnected from the reality of the trenches. This result
is foreshadowed in the preface, where the author states one purpose of
the book as filling the gap in "theory and research between social and
organizational psychology, on the one hand, and political science and
psychohistory, on the other." The book may in fact contribute to this,
but I wonder if this is the gap we should be filling. A case could be made
that the most significant gap is the one between the abstract, academic
view of leadership and the reality of trying to manage day-to-day in
complex organizations. My greatest fear is that the recent idolization of
the "transformational leader" with super-hero qualities will become yet
another stereotype (a more elegant version of "manager versus leader")
that consumes leadership researchers and human resource personnel,
not to mention the managers out there who have yet another "ideal" to
live up to (it's probably easier to live with not being a 9-9 leader than to
be accused of lacking vision and inspiration). That Bass provides a questionnaire to measure transformational and transactional qualities is indeed a mixed blessing.
In the final part of the book, Bass quotes Kelvin as saying that "if you
can't measure it, you don't know what you are talking about." But as
some of Kelvin s own findings later showed, just because you can measure something doesn't mean that you understand it. The findings in
this book need to be taken seriously and integrated into our slowly
growing understanding of what leadership is all about. But we need to
McCall: Review of Leadership and Performance I 483

remember our past"great man theory," leadership styles, human relations, contingency theory, trait theoryeven while we look eagerly
for more parsimonious explanations. The book begins with the hope
that it will be a "major breakthrough in understanding what it takes for
leaders to have great effects on their followers." My hope is that it will
add some richness to the ways we think about leadership and open up
some new possibilities. But until theorists and researchers learn more
about leaders on linethe problems, the torments, the victories that
confront managers on a day-to-day basiswe run the risk of chasing yet
another rainbow.
On the other hand, it's time we began to expect more from our leaders
and to inspire them to expect more from themselves. It is encouraging to
see research aimed at understanding the intangible and sometimes mystical qualities of inspired leadership. It is a modest beginning, but a
beginning nonetheless.
Morgan W. McCall, Jr., PhD is Senior Behavioral Scientist and Director of
Research at the Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina.

References
Bennis, W. and Nanus, B. Leaders: The strategies for taking charge. New York:

Harper & Row, 1985.

Bums, J. M. Leadership. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
House, R. J. A 1976 theory of charismatic leadership. In Hunt, James G., and
Larson, Lars L., Leadership: The cutting edge, pp. 189-207, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1977.
Peters, T. J., and Waterman, R. H., Jr. In search of excellence: Lessons from America's

best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

Vaill, P Toward a behavioral description of high-performing systems. In
McGall, Morgan W., Jr., & Lombardo, Michael M., Leadership: Where else can we
go?, pp. 103-125, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978.

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