We made this bed … now look who’s lying in it

Abstract

In considering the ‘Populist Responses to Austerity and Cultural Change: Brexit, Trumpism and Beyond’, there is a temptation, even a degree of comfort, in depicting 2016 as a kind of deviant moment in which non-elite anger and anxiety fueled an outburst of anti-progressive energy and the electoral victory of demagogues. The proposition put forth in this essay is that leadership scholarship is itself culpable. Transformational leadership, the dominant theme of that discourse, relies on the individual leader as an exceptional individual capable, even obliged, to reshape the worldview of followers in order to align them with the leader’s approach. By favoring an appeal to emotions over a rational exchange of positions, by assuming the superiority of one set of values over any others, by denying the validity of differing and/or conflicting interests, and by asserting authority based on hierarchical position rather than informed choice and consent, transformational leadership veered closely to our understanding of demagogues. Unintended though it may be, the dominant discourse becomes engrained as a ‘regime of truth’ into a pervasive, highly problematic social norm. Leadership scholars must accept a degree of responsibility and reconsider romantic notions of leadership in order to advance alternatives, not only to Trump and his particular agenda but also to the problematic assumptions embedded in and wider effects entwined with leadership thought.

Keywords

Critical studies demagogues leadership Trump

On the night of 21 July 2016, Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President with the declaration that ‘I alone’ can fix the ‘crisis’ that besets the United States. The dystopian vision of crisis that he depicted evoked images of ‘violence in our streets and chaos in our communities’, as well as the ‘fact’ that ‘180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens’. But rest assured, the nominee promised listeners both in the convention hall and around the nation that things ‘will all change’ when ‘I take office’ (Trump, 2016).

Claiming crisis is a common leadership tactic, inviting support by followers of command-and-control styles of decision-making (Grint, 2010; Staw et al., 1981) while attracting attributions of charisma for the claimant (Haslam et al., 2001). George W. Bush’s declaration of an unbounded ‘war on terror’ worked to legitimize a rapid erosion of civil and human rights (Hoopes, 2008; Kerr, 2008), thus helping to pave the way for Trump to associate talk of a crisis with further rights’ erosion. Yet even within in these terms, Trump’s claim of a crisis was extreme.¹ It was his insistence that ‘I alone’ could heal the nation’s alleged wounds that attracted considerable commentary in the media. This was demagoguery (Gerson, 2016; Meyer, 2016), a heroic leader-centered approach heavily reliant on opportunistic pandering to people’s prejudices and passions and in which a leader claims a role as the ‘one’ who has come to save the many (Cramer, 1945; Neumann, 1938).²

While perhaps counter-intuitive, demagogic leadership, with its emphasis on top-down command rather than participative dialogue, can flourish in democracies precisely because politicians need to find ways to garner voter support if they are to secure and sustain power (Neumann, 1938; Signer, 2009). Appealing to fear and anger is a way to gain support. Late 19th- and early 20th-century populist movements in the United States, for instance, turned to racist appeals to bolster their popular support across the South (Woodward, 1973). The growing influence of 21st-century populist parties in many countries built support by appeals to dark fears and retrograde images of the good society (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017; Wodak, 2016).³

In what seems especially prescient, given Trump’s many claims of being better than anyone else to lead America,⁴ Neumann (1938) argued that demagogic leaders regard themselves as ‘God-sent, almost God-like’ (p. 487). It is just that lack of self-doubt and self-knowledge that invites the attribution of boldness and transformational visions. Trump’s triumph thus reveals the overlapping qualities of transformational and demagogic leadership. It is an overlap that, we insist, has been overlooked by academic advocates of transformational leadership, thereby implicating the field of leadership studies in Trump’s rise.⁵

Scholars have engaged in a robust examination of ‘bad’ leaders, exploring, in particular, the reasons followers go along, often acting against their own best interests (e.g. Kellerman, 2004; Lipman-Blumen, 2005). But what of ‘good’ leaders? Are those who are labeled as exemplary necessarily innocent of the charge of demagoguery? James MacGregor Burns, whose seminal 1978 Leadership triggered a widespread embrace of the concept of transformational leadership in the 1980s and beyond, finessed that question entirely. ‘Good’, as in moral seeking to advance Enlightenment values, and ‘leadership’ were co-constructed. Demagogues—here, Burns (2003) was thinking explicitly of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—were deemed to not be leaders at all; instead, they stood accused of wielding ‘naked power’ rather than exercising leadership (p. 28).

This desire to separate ‘leadership’ from ‘demagoguery’, however, risks ignoring the kinds of effects that demagogues have on followers, those who are influenced by and support leaders. In the case of Trump, his effect on followers appears disconcertingly similar to the kind of impact scholars insist transformational leaders ought to have. Trump supporters as his rallies, both before and after the election, appear actively and enthusiastically engaged and motivated. They endorse his transformational message, locating moral superiority in both his vision and their support (Saunders, 2016; Walsh, 2016).

Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ vision is shaped by racism, sexism, and xenophobia and built on an enthusiastic embrace of scientific ignorance, distortion, and fear. Look, for instance, at his

Disdain of women: ‘Grab them by the pussy’ (Fahrenthold, 2016);

Denunciation of Mexican immigrants: ‘They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime; they’re rapists’ (Moreno, 2016);

Bias against Mexican judges: he has an ‘absolute conflict’ in presiding over litigation because he is ‘of Mexican heritage’ (Kendall, 2016);

Efforts to ban Muslims: demanding a ‘total and complete’ shutdown until immigration authorities ‘can figure out what’s going on’ (BBC News, 2017);

Order to rid the military of transgendered people: tweeting that ‘the United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military’ (Phillip et al., 2017);

Rejection of the science of climate change: tweeting that ‘the concept of global warming was created by the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive’ (Jacobson, 2016).

These examples—and they are only those from a list that expands regularly—demonstrate the considerable gulf between Trump’s agenda and the hoped-for enlightenment of transformational leadership.

Trump’s election has elicited some early analysis about the ‘moment’ and how his style and message connected with a particular context created by perceptions and shaped by reactions not just to Trump but also to his opponent, Hillary Clinton (Larkin, 2017). Fair enough, but we focus here on a different context—one composed of an interaction between the same style and message, on one hand, and academic discourse on transformational leadership, on the other. Our argument is that Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of other right-wing populists who currently abound in Western democracies, can and should be taken as a horrifying but not surprising manifestation of the way leadership has come to be understood.

A direct line to Trump

By trafficking in assertions of individual causation, leadership discourse plays a key role in legitimizing and proliferating heroic ideals and expectations of those in charge (Spector, 2016; Wilson, 2016). Expert ‘power/knowledge’ discourses have considerable power to shape societal values (Foucault, 1978, 1980, 2010). That discourse, in turn, reshapes basic assumptions on how to do leadership research and institutionalizes expectations of how leadership will be viewed and how its impact will be assessed (Alvesson, 1996; Spector, 2016; Wilson, 2016). By engraining a ‘regime of truth’ into institutional and organizational norms, the influence of expert knowledge becomes even more profound (Foucault, 1978, 2010). The notion of the individual heroic leader thus metastasizes from theoretical ideal to that of a pervasive, highly problematic social norm.

This diffusion process occurs as scholarly efforts at precision in theoretical constructs are then translated by consultants and practitioners (and, subsequently, the business press), as well as scholarly educators, into knowledge rendered digestible for the domain of practice. Starting from the early 1980s, claims for ‘transformation’ as a desirable leadership approach have found ready alignment with wider business and societal discourses on the ‘need for change’, for ‘breakthrough strategies’, and for eliciting greater worker motivation and involvement. It becomes the responsibility of the heroic transformational leader to address these needs and for followers to embrace a ‘need’ to be transformed (Spector, 2016; Tourish, 2013; Wilson, 2016).

At a time when market volatility, strategic complexity, and a heightened interest in worker motivation and involvement might have indicated an approach focused on greater use of more distributed modes of decision-making, transformational leadership theory appeared as a countervailing trend. Thomas Carlyle’s proposition that it is ‘great men’ who ‘make history’ thus reemerged, cleansed of its overt religiosity and, not entirely, of its blatant gender bias and cloaked in the language of the academy (Spector, 2016; Wilson, 2016).

It is important to recall that Carlyle’s work found special favor among the rising acolytes of 20th-century fascism in both Italy and Germany (Schapiro, 1945; Steinweis, 1995). Carlyle, with his Great Man theory, was called upon to add a ‘veneer of respectability’ to ‘the fascists, who were delighted to find their ideas proclaimed in eloquent words by the great Victorian’ (Schapiro, 1945: 114). A number of influential trait theorists had ties to the eugenics movement, thereby continuing a link between leadership studies and notions of leaders as exception and leadership as an inherently anti-egalitarian force (Wilson, 2016). This is the unwelcomed and unacknowledged territory into which many leadership scholars have inadvertently stumbled.

The rise of the ‘transformational’ leader

Transformational leadership relies on the individual leader as an exceptional, even gifted, person who brings about a dramatic conversion in organizations, communities, and nations through appealing to emotions and values, not just reason. Transformational leaders are said to offer bold visions for the future, be charismatic in style, and exert an effect amounting to conversion on the part of their followers. This account of what a leader could be, even should be, quickly became the dominant discursive regime in leadership research and teaching in the wake of Burns’ writing (Hunt, 1999). By the end of the 20th century, articles examining transformational leadership outnumbered all leadership articles using other theories—trait theory, path-goal theory, and leader-member exchange theory among them—combined (Lowe and Gardner, 2000). Transformational leadership was theorized as critical for lifting organizational performance ‘beyond expectations’ (Bass, 1985) and for assuring a robust future for the entire national economy (Tichy and Ulrich, 1984).

Shifting from Burns’ political setting, transformational leadership theorists married their construct to hierarchical authority within business corporations (Bass, 1985). Transformational manager-leaders thereby became authorized, indeed encouraged, to alter employee-followers’ sense of self, their understanding of reality, and even their values. Leaders could and should seek to change the worldview of followers in order to align them with the leader’s interpretation of the needs of the organization (Bass, 1985). The dominance of transformational leadership enhanced the moral and performative power of management, aligning with wider neo-liberal managerialist discourses (Parker, 2002).

Transformational leaders were expected to develop devoted followers who looked to their leaders for guidance, direction, and inspiration—to see the leader as a role model for how they should think and act, and strive to replicate their approach and promote their agenda. The bond between leaders and followers should be based not on a simple transaction or negotiated contract but on a belief that the leader cares for followers and offers useful, valid, and exciting ideas. A transactional exchange, in which leaders and followers negotiated a rational understanding of purpose based on consciously weighed alternative modes of behavior and made an informed, consensual choice (Downton, 1973), was now problematized as horse-trading (Burns, 1978) and ‘a prescription for mediocrity’ (Bass, 1990: 21).

The experience of being transformed by the leader is said to be developmental in nature and, hence, in follower’s own best interests. A high degree of assimilation became a baseline requirement of these leaders, demanding an extraordinary degree of mono-culturalism within organizations while denying the legitimacy of differing, even conflicting interests as a core feature of organizational reality (Pushkala and Mills, 1997). Transformational leaders were idealized as all-knowing, all-powerful beings able to meet our every need (Gabriel, 1997; Tourish, 2013).

By favoring an appeal to emotions over a rational exchange of positions, by assuming the superiority of one set of values over any others, by emphasizing conversion of followers, by denying the validity of differing and/or conflicting interests, and by asserting authority based on hierarchical position rather than informed choice and consent, transformational leadership veered closely to our understanding of demagogues. And yet, transformational leadership was posited not just as effective but also as ethical and moral (Bass, 1990; Bass and Stiedlmeier, 1999). Little wonder, then, that the rapid evolution of a leadership development industry in recent decades, abetted by a commitment to leadership development in leading US and UK MBA programs, has adopted uncritically the transformational leadership construct (Kellerman, 2012; Tourish, 2013; Tourish et al., 2010).

Buying into these grand expectations about what it means to be a leader has, meanwhile, been linked to narcissistic attitudes and behaviors by manager-leaders, risky decision-making, the emergence of cult-like organizational cultures where basic freedoms of thought and expression are stifled, and management/leadership that is dangerously out of touch with the daily realities of organizational life (Mintzberg, 2004, 2009; Tourish, 2013). Notably, there is extensive critical commentary on Trump that highlights these same concerns (e.g. McAdams, 2016; Sargent, 2017). Managers often struggle to live up to these grand expectations and can, as a result, come to feel a fundamental sense of failure about who they are (Ford et al., 2008).

While proposing bold visions and fostering change clearly have its place as part of leadership, the persistent danger is that a ‘macho bullying management style’—this is Tourish’s (2013) term—can come to be honored as an example of transformational leadership, as was the case with Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca (Spector, 2014), General Electric’s Jack Welch (Seligman, 2002), Apple’s Steve Jobs (Isaacson, 2011), and for a time, Uber’s Travis Kalanick (Spector, 2017). Followers, meanwhile, are encouraged to develop dangerous levels of dependency on their manager-leader for both practical and moral guidance (Wilson, 2016). Dependency likely impedes innovation, problem-solving, and personal development. Indeed, at its most intense, transformational leadership can be understood to demand of followers that they strive to render themselves into clones of their leader (Tourish, 2013; Wilson, 2016). The assumption in transformational leadership thought that the follower is constituted by an existential lack, for which the leader provides the remedy, demands re-thinking if we are to avoid these problems.

Watching Trump speak to his core followers at campaign rallies—some of which have been held after the election (McCaskill, 2017)—provides evidence of the transformational dynamics that have been so extensively promoted by leadership scholars. Trump supporters are quick to adopt and advocate, even chant, his key messages (‘make American great again’, ‘build the wall’, ‘lock her up’),⁶ however non-substantive, erroneous, or egregious those messages may be. Trump is shaping a worldview among followers that either matches his own or reflects his cynical judgment about how to promote his self-interests. Followers are excited and actively engaged; they want to support the enactment of his vision. Despite his elite position as a multi-billionaire, followers articulate a conviction that he speaks for them and cares about the ‘average’ citizen (Debate.Org, 2016). And policies advocated by Trump and cheered by his followers—especially concerning health care and taxes—threaten to cause serious damage to their interests while enhancing the very elites against which they rail (Heer, 2017).

Accepting (some) responsibility

Given the prevailing character of leadership discourse in recent decades, then, we should not be so shocked when a politician seeking our votes appeals to our desire for a leader who will cure our ills. People often attribute the success or failure of institutions, societies, and any other group to the actions of individual leaders (Meindl et al., 1985). Scholars can and should surface the more complex story of interactions, but we can never deny the appeal of individual attribution. To understand the world, we construct narratives and tell stories. Inherent in that mode of understanding is the romantic drama of the hero’s transcendent journey. That hero may succeed or fail in our narrative, but as an individual, he or she resides at the core of the story and the center of our hope.

Theorists take great care when specifying their concepts and constructs and strive to formulate ethically sound prescriptions (Antonakis et al., 2004; Bass and Stiedlmeier, 1999). Yet these principled concerns so easily get lost when ideas become popularized into everyday discourse and practice. Theorists also inevitably make assumptions, of which they may be unaware, that profoundly shape what they advocate (Alvesson, 1996; Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001; Hunter et al., 2007). Unintended though it may be, then, the popular translation of transformational leadership theory, along with its troubling assumptions, helps to explain the rise and rise of Trump the demagogic leader and his devoted followers. The manifestation of this same problem in workplaces presents its own dangers.

Consistent with transformational leadership, but now awash with an overtly demagogic flavor, Trump offers a bold vision that implies sweeping changes, captured by the slogan ‘make America great again’. Like earlier transformational leaders and like a number of contemporary right-wing populist leaders in Europe and the United Kingdom, similarly inclined to demagoguery (Wodak et al., 2013), he relies far more on heated rhetoric and bold promises than on policies informed by evidence and/or on actually delivering results (as 2017 comes to an end, Hillary Clinton is not in jail, the Affordable Care Act has not been repealed, and a wall is not under construction along the Mexican border) in order to tighten the bonds with his followers. He commonly adopts a charismatic style of communication, seeking to elicit an emotional response often involving hate and fear of ‘the other’, peppered with nostalgic hope for an imagined future that rests, simultaneously, on an imagined past of White American greatness (Brownstein, 2016; Reicher and Haslam, 2017).

Trump’s election demonstrated that many Americans—not most or even a majority of those who voted—accepted his message.⁷ An important aspect of Trump’s ascendency was his positioning as both messenger and role model, as one who best represents the needs, values, vision, and way of life his followers seek for themselves and whose actions and opinions they ought to emulate (Reicher and Haslam, 2017).). Trump sought to showcase himself as a personification of American ‘greatness’. His accomplishments were superior to anyone’s (Noble, 2017).⁸ His assertion of individual greatness resonated with the wider discourse of American exceptionalism (Tyrrell, 1991). It also echoed a theme of redemption and return to primacy common in a broad spectrum of fascist movements (Mackel, 2010).

Given that Trump’s approach is also clearly a lesson in demagoguery, the situation demands that we think differently about what leadership means for us and what we want it to be. We must reconsider our romantic notions of leadership if we are to advance alternatives, not only to Trump and his particular agenda but also to the problematic assumptions embedded in and wider effects entwined with leadership thought. Transformational leadership ideas rely on the assumption that leaders and followers serve a common purpose (Ford and Harding, 2017). Followers are presumed to be lacking in the capacity to determine goals and values for themselves; hence, they need a leader to address this fundamental lack. This profoundly anti-egalitarian assumption holds that some (leaders) are gifted and most (followers) are deficient (Wilson, 2016).

The Trump claim—that ‘I alone’ can fix what is supposedly broken—may seem extreme. Of course it is. But we should also recognize that leadership discourse has regularly trafficked in and, as a result, reinforced this desire for heroic individuals. If leadership scholars are to make a meaningful contribution to the dangers currently posed by the new wave of demagogues—Trump in the United States and also Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, Frauke Petry in Germany, Marian Kotleba in Slovakia, Jimmie Åkesson in Sweden, and Marine Le Pen in France among them—then we all must come to grips with just where our own choices have taken us.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This work was submitted to Populist Responses to Austerity and Cultural Change: Brexit, Trumpism and Beyond special paper series.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Bert Spector is an associate professor, International Business & Management, at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business. His research interests include leadership, critical management studies, and management and organizational history. His most recent book, Discourse on Leadership: A Critical Appraisal, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

Suze Wilson is a senior lecturer at Massey University’s School of Management. Her research interests include leadership theory, discourse analysis, and critical management studies. Her most recent book, Thinking Differently About Leadership: A Critical History of Leadership Studies, was published by Edward Elgar in 2016.

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