ABSTRACT

The American political scientist James MacGregor Burns (in his 1978 book Leadership) said that ‘divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management’. Burns was responsible for developing the original concept of transformational leadership (in contrast to transactional leadership), when he was trying to distinguish between the leadership of people like Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (which he saw as transformational) and that of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin (which he saw as transactional).