The following essay addresses the complex topic of leadership in the modern challenging world, explains the specific role of Transformational, Transactional, and Situational Leadership. The focus of this paper is on the place of above mentioned leadership models in scholarship, practice and leadership model. The essay determines the similarities between the models, analyzes the differences in their approaches and provides the new insight into the understanding of scholarship, practice and leadership model.



Leaders all over the world are facing unprecedented challenges: new cultures, new jobs, new markets, and new business environment. The current complexities of work, the sheer volume of information flowing in, and the rapid changes taking place require leaders and people they lead to work in new ways.

Nowadays leaders instead of maintaining the norms have to challenge them. The expectations to the leader are much higher now than a decade ago. In almost every field there are new materials, tools, techniques, theories and ways of organizing. It means, that “we must all be constant learners or we’ll soon be obsolete and out of work (Clawson, 2006, p.22)." One cannot effectively manage people into the battle, one should lead. And modern life is everyday battle against the uncertainty. Leadership is about alignment, understanding, and change.

Lifelong learning is critical to survival. Reading, thinking, ingesting, digesting, pondering, struggling, skimming, researching, and investigating, all with a sense of urgency represent the new normal way of life. This learning orientation is especially important in leadership. The leaders in the new context will value anticipation, risk-taking, new ideas. They develop a value for change.

This essay will specify the behaviors, which fall into the scholar practitioner leader (SPL) Model to allow the comparison of the transformational, transactional and servant leadership models to the behaviors and relationships, which are basic for the SPL Model. This comparison will help to analyze the differences and chose the model which is the most related to scholarship, practice and leadership model.

The scholarship part of the model does imply the importance of lifelong learning, which includes according to Macoustra the ability to know when information is needed and to have the skill to identify, locate, evaluate, organize, and effectively use that information. Bruce (1999) adds to this list critical thinking and effective operation within an information society. As a scholar leader is supposed to be able to follow the tendencies and the changes of the contemporary world and learn new ways of action, reevaluate his ways of solutions. Scholarship behaviors of the SPL Model could be defined as follows: Integrate lifelong learning process into one’s routine, deal with complexity and ambiguity of constantly changing environment, know the information needed and the resources necessary to complete the task or solve the problem, be able to find, analyze critically, and question information, theories, assumptions and information.

As a practitioner the leader has not only to possess theoretical background, but also to apply this knowledge practically, even if the extent to which businesses rely on the scholarship might be not obvious given of its hidden nature. Practitioners do not document their methodologies, work, sources, their process, contexts, and research materials, so the elements of scholarship in practice and leadership become invisible as soon as the touchstones of new strategy are developed or the decision is made (Alred, 2006). Practice in the SPL model could be defined as the ability: to analyze ones own behavior, appraise it, articulate weaknesses and strengths and integrate the feedback into the practice of self improvement, to translate theoretical knowledge into practice and effective leadership behavior, become a role model for the followers, to promote informational literacy and develop information literate employees, coach people, to create functional organization for the goal achievement, to demonstrate internal consistency, which includes consistent behavior, and being the pattern of one’s values, emotional stability and support for the followers.