The Cause of King Saul's Failure from the Perspective of Transformational Leadership

The purpose of this study is to analyze the cause of King Saul's failure from the perspective of transformational leadership. Prior research mainly summarized their leadership characteristics by finding examples of successful leaders among biblical figures. However, it is necessary to analyze failed leadership in that there are many failed leaders among biblical figures and various perspectives are needed in leadership analysis. For this study, we look at the Bible content, the study that analyzed King Saul from a theology perspective, and the study that deals with transformational leadership from a business administration perspective. Transformational leadership was first conceptualized by Burns (1978) and its constituent factors are charisma, individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, and inspirational motivation (Bass and Avolio, 1994). Saul is splendidly crowned as the first king of Israel by God's choice, but fails to demonstrate leadership and falls. From the perspective of transformational leadership, King Saul has the following problems. (1) Saul lacked charisma, such as making his subordinates tremble and not being able to role models on his own (1 Sam 13:6-9). (2) Saul lacked individualized consideration, such as not allowing the soldiers to eat food in the war against the Philistines (1 Sam 14:24). (3) Saul was unable to intellectually stimulate his subordinates to solve problems when Goliath insulted God (1 Sam 17:1-16). (4) Saul was insufficient to be an inspirational motivation through a sharing vision(1 Sam 17:1-16).