The Democratization of Work from an Intellectual History Perspective: A Transformational Leadership Theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33581/fzf8nv54Keywords:
Leadership, transformational leadership, management and organizational history, management educationAbstract
Amid rising calls for more democratic approaches to organizing, revisiting the intellectual roots of transformational leadership provides valuable insights. First articulated by American political scientist James MacGregor Burns in the late 1970s, transformational leadership quickly became one of the most influential frameworks in management and leadership studies. At its core, the theory emphasizes leaders as visionaries who connect with followers’ higher-order needs, motivating them to achieve exceptional outcomes that transcend routine organizational goals. Yet, an important element of Burns’ original conception is often neglected in contemporary management discourse, its democratic foundation. Burns envisioned leadership as a reciprocal, participatory process rooted in democracy, where citizens empowered leaders through electoral choice and removed them when they failed to uphold their commitments. In this view, leadership was inseparable from accountability, collective engagement, and the principles of democratic governance. However, when the theory was imported into business scholarship, the democratic dimension was largely stripped away. Instead, the focus shifted almost exclusively to leaders’ charisma, vision, and influence over followers, with less attention paid to the reciprocal, bottom-up dynamic that Burns considered essential. This reinterpretation has shaped decades of management practice, narrowing the scope of transformational leadership to organizational performance rather than democratic participation. By employing an intellectual history perspective, we highlight the gap between Burns’ original vision and its management adaptation. We examine how the democratic aspects were lost, why this omission matters for both theory and practice, and how recovering these roots could enrich contemporary understandings of leadership in more inclusive and participatory ways.
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