Charismatic leadership and demagoguery

According to the 2007 Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, “Charismatic leadership is a relatively new and distinct paradigm,” putting its origin in “the 1970s” (Bullock, “Charismatic Leadership Theory” 70). The entry, like much other work in management and organizational theory, emphasizes the “positive effects” of charismatic leadership, while granting one sentence to some drawback (charismatic leaders can “create divisions within the groups they lead, display an authoritarian management style, and focus on trivial matters” 70). Since research on charismatic leadership began at least with Weber’s 1919 Lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” and since historians typically characterize such figures as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Josef Stalin as charismatic leaders, claiming that the paradigm is recent and reducing the potential negatives of that model of leadership to one sentence might strike readers familiar with that scholarship as surprising, if not shocking.

But that history (and idealizing) of charismatic leadership is typical in current management doctrine. Bruce Avolio and Francis Yammarino, in their introduction to Transformational and Charismatic Leadership (2002) describe charismatic leaders as ones who “foster performance beyond expected standards by developing an emotional attachment with followers and other leaders, which is tied to a common cause, which contributes to the ‘greater good’ or larger collective,” an approach they define as “representing the moral high road of leadership” (xvii), a claim that might be called something even stronger than shocking, such as appalling.

Management theory has had inadequate discussion of the dangers of charismatic leadership, although some work (e.g., Steyrer) point out the connections between charisma and narcissistic traits. By far, the dominant way of talking about leadership is to privilege charismatic over Weber’s other sources of authority, and to present it as nearly ideal (with, as in the Bullock, some mild criticisms). We are, in short, in an era of nearly unqualified infatuation with a model of leader and follower/employee that is actually a very dangerous one, and profoundly antidemocratic, even authoritarian.

The charismatic leader is not just different from the leader who gets authority from law or tradition, but from one whose authority is grounded in expertise (the kind described by Hannah Arendt). The legitimate leader is one who is given authority by the followers because she has demonstrated context-specific knowledge. Charismatic leadership, on the contrary, presumes a personality trait that enables universally-valid and instantaneous decision-making abilities.

Charismatic leadership is a relationship that requires complete acquiescence and submission on the part of the follower. The charismatic leader is threatened by others taking leadership roles, pointing out her errors, or having expertise to which she should submit because it assumes that power is limited (the more power that others have, the less there is for the leader to have). It is a relationship of pure hierarchy. It is simultaneously a robust and fragile relationship because it can withstand an extraordinary amount of disconfirming evidence (that the leader is not actually all that good, does not have the requisite traits, is out of her depth, is making bad decisions) by simply rejecting them; it is fragile, however, insofar as the admission of a serious flaw on the part of the leader destroys the relationship entirely. The power of the leader is reduced by giving power.

As Arendt argued, the leader whose power comes from legitimacy (she uses the term authority, but that’s a vexed term) benefits from discursively egalitarian systems. Her authority is strengthened by the expertise, contributions, and criticism of others. And management theory, it seems to me, by setting out the charismatic leader as the ideal leader, has precluded leadership grounded in legitimacy.

Since we are also in an era in which, despite market meltdowns and other troubling signs, the business leader is idealized as the ideal kind of leader (with universally valid judgment skills), we are in an era when the charismatic leader–that is, an anti-democratic and authoritarian model of leadership–is imagined as the only and best model.

That’s dangerous.