TRANSFORMATIONAL AND TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE ORGANIZATIONS

Nash’s scholarly study of how transactional and transformational leadership impacts the relationship between mental health counselors and their managers.

To his credit, the author identifies a gaping hole in academic research on leadership—while the literature on leadership in business contexts is copious, few studies address the relationship between mental health counselors and their managers. In response, Nash has devised an empirical study that specifically focused on the difference between two kinds of leadership, transformational and transactional. Transformational leadership is defined by its four principal aims: inspiration, positive motivation, the promotion of self-confidence, and “allowing the follower to visualize the purpose of his or her work progress.” By contrast, transactional leadership expresses itself as a narrower “give-and-take type of interaction” that focuses on a system of rewards and punishments for employee performance. In order to understand what works best between mental health counselors and their managers, Nash interviewed 10 counselors and four managers at two different mental health facilities. But this is quite a narrow pool of participants to draw definite conclusions from. The author surmises that while transactional leadership can be effective at increasing productivity, transformational leadership is ultimately “more effective in producing long-term improvements in performance and counselor-manager relationships.” Given the extraordinary stress mental health counselors face—they are uniquely vulnerable to problems related to morale and burnout—the author’s attempt to understand that environment is timely and important. However, Nash’s study as a whole, like the field of leadership literature at large, is frustratingly vague—the categories investigated are too broadly defined to be a consistently helpful guide. Moreover, the author could have presented his findings more succinctly in a brief article. (For example, he constantly defines and redefines the two types of leadership in question without any increased specificity.) One hopes Nash's call for a greater scrutiny of the way in which mental health centers are run is answered by more ambitious empirical explorations than the ones carried out here.

A much-needed study but lacking in sufficient scientific rigor.