The paradigm of the charismatic leader

Since the 1970s, the field of leadership studies has sustained itself largely by inventing and popularizing leadership adjectives (‘transformational’, ‘authentic’, ‘distributed’, ‘servant’, etc.). The most popular of these adjectives have a following with their own psychometric measures, leadership development programmes, academic celebrities, and conferences. It is indeed hard to imagine what leadership studies would look like without its adjectives and their followings.

For those who uphold the hypothetico-deductive method in leadership studies, these adjectives point to constructs of leadership. A construct, in this neo-positivist tradition, is a theoretical abstraction created by researchers that is subsequently used to explain and predict empirical phenomena by means of a leadership measure. But once the construct is established, its artificial nature is quickly forgotten. The construct is now taken to refer to a phenomenon with more or less stable relations to other phenomena. The construct has become something that can explain things, rather than being something that must itself be explained. For instance, most leadership researchers consider transformational leadership to be a real empirical phenomenon that can be measured and tested. These tests show that transformational leadership positively correlates to other constructs such as job satisfaction or organizational performance that are equally stable and real. This is what most empirical studies of leadership, in the positivist tradition, have in common: they present a stable world where the favoured adjective is found to have all kinds of positive effects.

I am critical of the hypothetico-deductive tradition in leadership studies, but I did not write Leadership and Organization: A Philosophical Introduction as a critique of leadership studies. The book is rather motivated by an interest in the adjectives of leadership that the field of leadership studies has come up with. The premise of the book is that these leadership adjectives are much more interesting than we might suspect on the basis of construct-driven leadership research. In my view, mainstream leadership researchers are good in finding interesting adjectives, but they often fail to ask what these adjectives might tell us about leadership. There are literally thousands of articles about, say, transformational leadership, but no more than a handful consider the relation between leadership and transformation. For instance, the transformational leadership literature ignores the fact that kings have historically been understood as people who can transform others at will but who are themselves prohibited to change (Canetti, 1984). Do we also witness this ban on self-transformation in business organizations? To me, following such a thread is infinitely more interesting than the search for yet another correlation between transformational leadership and organizational performance. The former may advance our understanding of leadership in an organizational setting, while the latter does little more than contribute some grains of sand to the ruins of a sandcastle.

When construct-development in leadership studies is criticized, the most common argument is that it leads to so-called construct proliferation (Shaffer et al., 2016), which happens when new leadership constructs resemble existing ones to such an extent that they are redundant. Methodologically, construct proliferation is considered a problem because different constructs are, in theory, designed to capture different empirical phenomena. If measures of authentic leadership have the same empirical object as measures of transformational leadership, the research efforts of authentic leadership researchers are in vain as they necessarily fail to increase the stock of knowledge. Leadership research is, according to this perspective, in constant danger of violating the parsimony principle, which holds that entities ought not to be needlessly multiplied (Borman and Rowold, 2018).

In my view, such criticism misses a more fundamental problem with the hypothetico-deductive method in leadership studies, namely the problem of tautology (see Spoelstra et al., 2016). Most constructs of leadership are from the outset designed to produce positive results that are not only close to what we already know, but suspiciously close to what is necessarily true. As Karl Popper might put it, leadership research fails to maximize the falsifiability of its theories and often appears to minimize the chance of falsifiability. For instance, if ethical leaders are by definition wonderful people, it should not come as a great surprise that ethical leadership is related to other positive phenomena such as job satisfaction or employee motivation. Leadership studies have institutionalized itself by performing the same pseudo-tautological test over and over again, namely whether organizations are better off when employees like their bosses.

Instead of leadership constructs, the book speaks of leadership concepts. Concepts of leadership can help us in exploring leadership, whereas constructs of leadership put an abrupt end to questioning. Concepts of leadership open up doors to worlds yet to be explored. These are not foreign worlds, but places that are all too familiar to us – so familiar that they appear natural. Concepts of leadership invite interrogation of the worlds that we inhabit, whereas constructs of leadership ask for obedience, awe and mechanical testing.

My original idea for the different chapters in the book was that they would each interrogate one leadership adjective. So, for instance, I envisioned chapters on leadership and transformation, leadership and servanthood, leadership and authenticity, leadership and distribution, and leadership and responsibility. In my mind, they would ask the questions that the literature on the corresponding constructs of leadership (transformational leadership, servant leadership, authentic leadership, distributed leadership and responsible leadership) fail to ask, precisely because of the closed nature of the leadership construct.

This initial focus can still be recognized in some of the chapters in the book, e.g. in the chapter on authenticity. However, as the project evolved, this structure faded more into the background, as I became more and more interested in a common paradigm for contemporary leadership thinking. I started to see more clearly that the different leadership concepts that are popular today do not propose radically different versions of leadership: they often share an assumption ground that I refer to as ‘the paradigm of the charismatic leader’. I would now say that my initial design for the book was still too much haunted by the false stability that leadership constructs suggest: the task shifted from interrogating leadership concepts individually to interrogating them in relation to one another. A number of other concepts – especially the concepts of authority, religion and image – became central in the text, as they assisted me in seeing the relations between different concepts of leadership and, ultimately, in understanding more deeply how leadership is thought about today.

In the book, I argue that the main feature of the paradigm of the charismatic leader is the idea that leadership is placed in opposition to office, i.e. the administered tasks, services and processes that the organization is engaged in. The leadership/management distinction, which has been popular in business discourse since the 1970s, is illustrative. The organization is represented by the manager, who is situated inside the organization. The manager’s task is to make the organization function smoothly. Leadership, however, is not subsumed under the organization. Rather, it is seen as a force from the outside that may present itself in the form of a vision or a moral example that changes the course of the organization for the good. Steve Jobs as ‘a saviour’ of Apple is an obvious example: Jobs, as a leader, was believed to reside in a place higher than the organization itself, which is why he was deemed capable of steering the company to new heights. What is led in contemporary notions of business leadership is ultimately not the individual person, but rather the organization as such. Leadership, according to the paradigm of the charismatic leader, is called for because the organization in its present form is seen as the problem. Leadership can offer a way out because it remains unaffected by the organization. Through inspiration, spirituality, authenticity, and so on, leadership offers hope for the future and even holds the promise of redemption. Transformational leadership serves again as an example: the transformational leader lifts organizations up to higher ground, whereas the transactional leader (which is another way of saying ‘manager’) can do no more than strike deals (‘transactions’) in accordance with their position.

I decided to refer to this way of thinking as the paradigm of the charismatic leader because the leadership/management distinction is, in my view, essentially an articulation of Max Weber’s distinction between charisma and bureaucracy. The charismatic leader, according to Weber, has no interest in the economy, i.e. the relations and exchanges that happen in ordinary life. Instead, he (not she: leadership is a manly affair in Weber) is considered to be extra-ordinary, in the literal sense of standing outside of the normal order. The charismatic leader is guided by his dreams, visions or moral values that are not, as it were, contaminated by social and economic conduct. The bureaucrat, by contrast, is fully part of the economy: he is essentially an officer who deals with ordinary affairs, aided by the rules that are given to him.

The analogy to contemporary ideas about leadership is striking: the leader in contemporary business thinking hovers above the organization so that he or she can act as a moral guide or a master of change. The many religious notions that are used to capture true leadership (spiritual, self-sacrificial, visionary, servant, etc.) bear witness to the tendency to look at leadership as something that is essentially beyond the ordinary sphere. Leadership has become firmly associated with a form of authority that is not based on either tradition or law, which is what Weber refers to as charismatic authority.

But what about apparently ‘post-charismatic’ concepts, such as authentic leadership, distributed leadership, or self-leadership? Do these concepts fall outside of the paradigm of the charismatic leader? Such concepts are attempts to find an alternative to the figure of the charismatic leader in that they seek to challenge the Carlylean Great Man fantasy that continues to haunt the leadership literature. However, my book questions whether these new concepts succeed in breaking with the reigning paradigm. For instance, recent calls for leadership to become more ‘distributed’, ‘shared’, or ‘collective’ remain faithful to the idea that leadership is essentially spiritual, breathing life into organizations, and that management is essentially bound to office. Indeed, much contemporary thinking about leadership can be brought back to a life/death dichotomy: leadership brings life (events, the new, change, moral values) whereas management kills life (structure, rules, tasks, control). The leadership adjectives that are popular today point to a higher sphere that can bring us back to life if we, the mortals who dwell in organizations, can gain access to it – be it through a representative of the divine in the guise of a Great Man or in a ‘distributed’ form that reaches us all. Leadership, in all of these images, is ultimately about spirits: about the ghosts that move us in certain directions, that inspire us, origin unknown.

I have already mentioned the critique that leadership constructs overlap one another, which, in the hypothetico-deductive tradition, is seen as a problem. I would say that leadership concepts do indeed overlap greatly. However, this is not due to faulty research, but rather due to underlying assumptions of leadership as it is culturally constructed today. The overlap is therefore not a problem to overcome; quite the contrary, it directs us to a culturally dominant way of seeing leadership. Without construct proliferation, the field of leadership studies would be much less interesting.

I wrote the book primarily because I find contemporary ideas about leadership interesting, but there is also something in contemporary leadership discourse that I find worrying. My fear is that the leadership/management distinction, or spirit/office distinction, separates something that should be thought in relation to each other. Organizational life is unthinkable without structures and formalized procedures; to dream up a spiritual force that would relieve us from their perceived burden strikes me as naïve. More problematic still is the idea that organizations should be populated by two kinds of people: leaders and officers. Weber (1978) himself, in one of his political writings called ‘Parliament and government in a reconstructed Germany’, suggested that bureaucrats ought to follow the rules and charismatic politicians ought to stick to their vision or their moral values (1403–1404). One group of people, the inferior group, is to stay ordinary, whereas the superior group is to reside in the elevated space of their personal morality. Leadership thinking, in many manifestations, is prone to create an image that fosters such a split. In the extreme, such a split can lead to a climate where charismatic leaders are allowed, and even encouraged, to demonstrate their otherworldliness by breaking social norms, e.g. in Trumpian fashion. In less extreme fashion, it creates a promise of salvation in a structureless bliss. Such bliss, it seems to me, does not rhyme well with the business of, say, automobiles or financial solutions.

At this point one might object that my portrayal of leadership studies is too bleak. After all, it would be quite an exaggeration to say that leadership scholars are unaware of the importance of rules and structures in organizations, or that they uncritically celebrate Great Men. Indeed, few leadership researchers would go as far as saying that leadership is good and management is bad or, in the slightly more nuanced version, that management is a necessary evil that leadership can redeem. Needless to say, the few that would defend such a view are clearly unfamiliar with the pages of this journal. But paradigms of thought do not only present themselves in explicit views or opinions of people. They make themselves felt in much more subtle ways, and often present themselves in people against their will. At times, paradigms of thought lead us to events that we, when asked, would all have been eager to avoid. Scholars of leadership, like all people, are not in control over the thoughts that they have, and that includes thoughts steered by notions of leadership. My primary interest in the book is therefore not what leadership researchers think, but rather the followership that leadership concepts call for. If it finds an audience, I hope it will be read as an invitation to consider the leadership that leadership concepts exercise over us.