Charisma: An ill-defined and ill-measured gift
Open accessAbstract
We take historical stock of charisma, tracing its origins and how it has been conceptualized in the sociological and organizational sciences literatures. Although charisma has been intensely studied, the concept is still not well understood and much of the research undertaken cannot inform policy. We show that the major obstacles to advancing our understanding of charisma have included issues with its definition, its confusion with transformational leadership, the use of questionnaire measures, and that it has not been studied using correctly specified causal models. To help spawn a new genre of research on charisma, we use signaling theory to provide a general definition of charisma, and make suggestions about how charisma should be conceptualized, operationalized, and modeled. We also describe trends and patterns in articles we reviewed, using cocitation as well as bibliometric analyses, and discuss the practical implications of our findings.
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While the notion of follower-rated questionnaires has been challenged in previous work on leadership, servant leadership has yet to be held to the same standard.
“While the notion of follow-rated questionnaires has been challenged in previous work on leadership (e.g.Antonakis, Bastardoz, Jacquart, & Shamir, 2016 on charismatic leadership), servant leadership has yet to be held to the same standard.”
From Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research (2019) · cites this paper as Antonakis, Bastardoz, Jacquart, & Shamir, 2016
This is not unique to servant leadership and there have been a number of efforts to improve survey design within the leadership field.
“This is not unique to servant leadership and there have been a number of efforts to improve survey design within the leadership field (see Antonakis et al., 2010;Antonakis et al., 2016;Antonakis, Bendahan, et al., 2014;Antonakis & House, 2014).”
From Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research (2019) · cites this paper as Antonakis et al., 2016
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References 137 · Cited by 410
Research works printed but not linked: 14
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- Authors
- Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Lausanne (CH)
- École de management de Lyon (FR)
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Shamir, Boas
- Venue
- Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2016-03-21
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 293-319
- ISSN
- 2327-0608 (ISSN-L)
- 2327-0616
- OpenAlex
- W2148399945
- Cited by
- 410
- References
- 137
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 49 · 2023: 53 · 2022: 44 · 2021: 54 · 2020: 41 · 2019: 35 · 2018: 35 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 3 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 11.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (publishedVersion)
- IRIS (submittedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- SERVAL (Université de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Leadership and Management in Organizations
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
- Keywords
- charisma, transformational leadership, signaling theory, causal models, leadership research
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