Changes in Government Organizational Structures

Leaders and managers are needed by all organizations, but there is a difference in these types of individuals. Leaders motivate and inspire; managers implement the leaders' vision. On rare occasions, one individual is both a leader and manager, but that is not usual in traditional organizations.

However, as government is faced with increased pressure to downsize (due in part to the recent Republican Contract with America), and as technology makes it possible for employees to live hundreds and even thousands of miles away from the office, there is an increased interest in using horizontal structures and creative managers within government, following trends which have been established in industry. This increases the need for managers who are also leaders, with the result that government organizational structures are likely to undergo significant change in the future.

Managers and leaders exist in all organizations, with some leaders also serving as managers, but general

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to accomplish these tasks results in disciplinary action for employees, without consideration for the reason that the new standards were not met. By contrast, a transformational leader may observe that if staffing levels are decreased, motivating workers through positive reinforcement and nontraditional benefits can result in the requisite increase in productivity. It is the inclusion of the workers in the decision-making process that sets the transformational leader apart from the transactional one (Keller, 1992, p. 493). Rost points out that transformational leadership, while gaining an increasingly large group of advocates, can limit managers if they do not pay attention to the overall definition of leadership and if they reject transactional leadership as a valid approach to the leadership question (1993, p. 125). Rost's concern is well-founded: a transformational leader in a transactional organization is not likely to be successful, just as a transactional leader in a transformational organization is likely to founder. The problem is in matching the type of leadership style applied to the type of organization in which the leader works. Transformational leadership can lead to significant changes in the organizations it
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Approximate Word count = 3252
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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