Back to basics: applying a parenting perspective to transformational leadership

Developmental processes lie at the heart of the relationship between transformational leaders. and followers. First, three major domains in which developmental outcomes have been mostly discussed, namely motivation, empowerment, and morality, are highlighted, expanded, and discussed. Next the analogy between transformational leaders and "good parents" is employed to explore the underlying developmental processes. Specifically, conceptualizations, notions, and findings are borrowed from the vast literature on parenting to help us understand these processes. Several major arguments and propositions, which can be tested empirically, are formulated by means of this analogy. These propositions and their conceptualization can broaden our perspective about the processes that underlie many of the outcome variables so frequently investigated and discussed in the leadership literature, and offer a major opportunity to probe the currently less explored developmental and dynamic aspects of leadership. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.