CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 337Leadership and Management in OrganizationsEmployee Performance and LeadershipJob Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior

The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective

Tourish, Dennis·2013·Routledge eBooks
DOI 10.4324/9780203558119
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Most research into leadership has presented leaders as heroic, charismatic and transformational ‘visionaries’. The leader, whether in business, politics or any other field, is the most important factor in determining whether organizations succeed or fail. Indeed, despite the fundamental mistakes which have, arguably, directly led to global economic recession, it is often still taken for granted that transformational leadership is a good thing, and that leaders should have much more power than followers to decide what needs to be done. The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership confronts this orthodoxy by illustrating how such approaches can encourage narcissism, megalomania and poor decision-making on the part of leaders, at great expense to those organizations they are there to serve. Written in a lively and engaging style, the book uses a number of case studies to illustrate the perils of transformational leadership, from the Jonestown tragedy in 1978 when over 900 people were either murdered or committed suicide at the urging of their leader, to an analysis of how banking executives tried to explain away their role in the 2008 financial crisis This provocative and hugely important book offers a rare critical perspective in the field of leadership studies. Concluding with a new approach that offers an alternative to the dominant transformational model, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership will be an invaluable text for academics interested in leadership, students on leadership courses requiring a more critical perspective, and anyone concerned with how people lead people, and the lessons we can learn.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.4324/9780203558119

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • A Jesus-centred approach to leadership has the potential to help executives develop integrity while countering forces that contribute to the dark side of leadership, namely hubris, greed and egotism.

    “We argue that this Jesus-centred approach to leadership has the potential to help executives develop integrity while countering those forces that contribute to the emergence of the dark side of leadership (Tourish 2013) namely hubris, greed and egotism.”

    From Having Burned the Straw Man of Christian Spiritual Leadership, what can We Learn from Jesus About Leading Ethically? (2017) · cites this paper as Tourish 2013

  • Tourish's critique of SAW and SLT is persuasive but its target is misplaced because what is addressed is a straw man of spiritual leadership as it pertains to Christian beliefs.

    “So while Tourish, among others (Carette and King 2005; Case and Gosling 2010) is persuasive in his suspicion of SAW and associated SLT, we suggest that what is being addressed is actually a 'straw man' of spiritual leadership as it pertains to Christian beliefs.”

    From Having Burned the Straw Man of Christian Spiritual Leadership, what can We Learn from Jesus About Leading Ethically? (2017) · cites this paper as Tourish 2013

  • Focusing on spirituality as inner transformation rather than external exhortation avoids the traps identified by Tourish and other critics of SAW.

    “By focusing on spirituality as inner transformation rather than external exhortation, we also avoid the traps identified by Tourish and other critics of SAW.”

    From Having Burned the Straw Man of Christian Spiritual Leadership, what can We Learn from Jesus About Leading Ethically? (2017) · cites this paper as Tourish 2013

Cites

Still being checked.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Tourish, D.
Affiliations
Royal Holloway University of London (GB)
Corresponding author
Tourish, Dennis
ORCID
Tourish, Dennis
Venue
Routledge eBooks
Publisher
Routledge
Published
2013-03-12
DOI
10.4324/9780203558119
OpenAlex
W2914316417
Cited by
333
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 40 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 29 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 30 · 2017: 31 · 2016: 27 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 1
FWCI
29.29
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Routledge eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Leadership and Management in Organizations
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Employee Performance and Leadership
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
Keywords
transformational leadership, dark side of leadership, narcissism, megalomania, leadership decision-making, Jonestown, 2008 financial crisis, bank executives, charismatic leadership, critical leadership studies

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review