There are several leadership styles represented in the film “Hoosiers.” This movie brings two different concepts called transactional leadership and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership styles are more concerned with maintaining the normal flow of operations, whereas a transformational leader goes beyond managing the daily tasks for leading their followers to success. Transactional leadership styles also include trying to establish direction, aligning people, they are dedicated to communication, creating teams, motivation and inspiration. A transformational leadership styles basically turn towards to creating the agenda and requests, they are dedicated to planning, policies and procedures. The leader’s job is always to adapt their leadership style to the different situations they come into contact with. A manager is meant to guide all workers/followers to make the right decisions in order to accomplish a certain task. The leadership styles used in “Hoosiers” are: legitimate, transactional, transformational, autocratic, democratic, reward power, expert and referent power. The primary leader in this film is Coach Norman Dale.
Coach Norman Dale is given the position of the new basketball high school coach in a small town in Indiana. This automatically gives him legitimate power because he has a known title in the town. It gives him authority in team organization and therefore the authority role in this community. As a leader, Coach Dale does a good job of adjusting his leadership style to the different situations that he is required to adapt to. He shows the characteristics of both, a transactional and a transformational leader. He is a transactional leader because he uses disciplinary power to motivate and encourage his team to perform at their best and to give the best of theirselves. However, he is also a transformational leader because he mainly focuses on team building and motivational activities with his players.