ACADEMIA Letters A Pragmatic Approach: Using Transactional Leadership to Efect Transformational Change Jeremy Bouchard Employee engagement and motivation require continuous efort by management practitioners no matter the industry or organization. Two of the most successful management and leadership approaches in the 21st-century are transactional and transformational leadership. The origins of transformational leadership stem from Burns, who pioneered transformation in his book titled; Leadership. The idea was further developed by Bass, who pioneered the term transfor- mational, and is studied extensively throughout academic literature (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987; Breevaart et al., 2014). Burns (1978) recognized great leaders could transform employees by tapping into their needs to increase motivation. In contrast, transactional leadership focuses on a framework of appealing to the interests of employees through a stimulus. Both approaches appeal to the follower’s needs. However, transformational leadership moves beyond transactional stimulus by incorporating a degree of ownership that benefts the organization and thus should be the goal of leadership (Bass & Bass, 2009). Transactional leadership occurs when there is an exchange of resources; resources can be anything of value to both parties but are not necessarily monetary and could be praise or recognition, building on an intrinsic reward. Kuhnert and Lewis (1987) succinctly defned transactional leadership as the substitution of one goal to increase organizational performance. Transformational leadership is defned as stimulation and elevation that has outreaching ef- fects that transform followers into ethical leaders by teaching employees how to recognize organizational complexities by being situationally aware (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987). The purpose of this article is to provide a framework for leadership practitioners navigating the landscape for using a fnancial, transactional relationship as the frst method of correcting Academia Letters, July 2021 Corresponding Author: Jeremy Bouchard, jeremyallengtr@gmail.com Citation: Bouchard, J. (2021). A Pragmatic Approach: Using Transactional Leadership to Efect Transformational Change. Academia Letters, Article 1807. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1807. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0