Transformational Leadership and Decision Making: Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton

Leadership is necessary in any modern day society. It is the ability to look into the past and understand its history, prepare for the future, while standing in present circumstance. This requires thoughtful, insightful, and decisive decision-making. To successfully lead Chester Barnard states that a leader must have superior ability to influence the behavior of subordinates and persuade them to follow a particular course of action. Madeleine K. Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton fit this definition and have been leaders in many different aspects of their lives.;This dissertation will evaluate the leadership and decision-making of Madeleine K. Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the respective years they served as Secretary of State. Particular emphasis will be on their roles in Kosovo's and Libya's humanitarian crisis. The study evaluates if and how particular leadership style affects the decision making process. The current study does not attempt to evaluate the United States foreign policy position in each of the sited countries. Instead, the study will evaluate the decisions made by each of these women in the foreign policy arena's unique and demanding circumstances. To perform this study content analysis is used with two theories simultaneously. Those theories are Riggio's and Bass' extension of the full leadership model; more specifically transformational leadership, and Simon's model of decision-making.