Charismatic Leadership in Work Organizations: An Evaluation for Energy Industry

Abstract

Charismatic leadership is a widespread application in organizational research and practice. Organizations favor charismatic leaders who are capable of motivating employees to achieve outstanding results. Scholars proposed various, often conflicting definitions of charismatic leadership. These include charisma as (a) an attribution by the followers to their leaders, (b) as an indicator of leader-follower relations, or (c) as a communication strategy composed of verbal and nonverbal tactics. Charismatic communication, the most recent approach, operationalizes charisma as a distinct measurable construct, which enhances research and construct validity. Charismatic communication is a trainable leadership skill that empowers leaders to motivate and inspire followers to achieve organizational objectives. However, defining charisma as a communication strategy includes theoretical and practical limitations. It deviates from the social/cultural anthropology approach, proposing that individuals earn charisma via overcoming hardships, in which communication skills are secondary. Further, the anthropological view indicates that charismatics primarily seek to respond to the needs of the members of their communities. Finally, overreliance on individual communication strategy as the primary source of influence runs risks of superficial leadership practices and development. To aid cross-disciplinary consistency and to enhance meritocracy in leadership, this chapter introduces the role of earned charisma. Earned charisma refers to the psychological legitimacy to influence others following the demonstration of outstanding achievement. Drawing from social identity theory, we further propose that charismatic leaders possess a unique capacity/ability to discern the needs of their followers by addressing the struggling follower prototype in need of a guider. The present chapter proposes a charismatic leadership model within work organizations focusing on earned charisma as a focal predictor, the leaders’ capacity to address the struggling follower prototype as a moderator of earned charismatic effects. Charismatic communication is an auxiliary predictor and moderator. Charismatic attributions and relations are used as outcome variables. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.