Does Charisma Be Taught? Tests Of Two Interventions

Over the past couple of months, we discussed several traits, skills, and behaviors that have contributed to the success of both past and present leaders. Intelligence, integrity, charisma, and confidence are some of the traits that characterize many of these leaders. Interpersonal skills, oratory skills, and conceptual skills are some of the more important skills that helped to shape their leadership style. Some of these skills go hand in hand with the traits that are essential for strong leadership. Meanwhile, the behaviors that drive these leaders include inspiring and motivating others, collaboration, having a strategic perspective and trust. Combined, these traits, skills and behaviors make for effective leadership.

It is commonly believed that people differ in various ways, and these individual differences play a detrimental role on their behaviour at work. To be more specific, individual differences include two kernel factors which refers to intelligence and personality. It is clear that individual differences are important in determining behaviour, however, there are other external factors which are equally important, such as working environment or culture within an organisation.

Personality is looked at everyday purposely and accidently. Whether you are judging how your new professor for the semester will be, or if you are studying your best friend for a project, personality is studied abundantly. While there are many ways to define personality, there is not a worldwide definition around. Personality is the unique combination of patterns that influence behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion in a human being (boundless.com). That is one of many ways of defining personality. When examining personality, there are four main approachable theories including: The Psychodynamic Approach, The Trait Approach, The Social-Cognitive Approach, and The Humanistic Approach.

Throughout history, certain leaders were described as having exceptional qualities, such as charisma, that enabled them to motivate followers to achieve outstanding performances. Used wisely, it’s certainly a blessing; indulged, it can be a curse and therefore, these leaders can lead people ahead or astray. Famous leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt all shared a similar quality, charisma, which helped them rise in power and become leaders for their countries. This rise in leadership is a cause of crisis situations, distress in people, and inspirational and charismatic leaders who give promising deliverances. At the time, many leaders were struggling to rebuild their nations and as a cause, many totalitarian dictators such

One of the single most important traits to possess in order to be an effective leader is charisma. Jeff Skilling exuding charisma and was able to convince the media, shareholders, employees, and everyone in between that he was acting in their interest and running a company with integrity and honesty. Skilling’s charisma can be seen in many instances during his career at Enron, but one of his more striking instances of charismatic leadership was how he was able to influence all of the workers at Portland General Electric to convert their 401k’s into company stock (Gibney, 2005). Though this may sound like a relatively commonplace act, it took massive amounts of charisma to gain the trust and confidence of an entire company’s employees.

Yukl, G. (1999). Evaluation of the conceptual weaknesses in transformational and charismatic leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 10, 285 – 305.

Charismatic leaders are able to inspire emotion and passion in their followers by being optimistic and enthusiastic. Without passionate and emotional employees, an organization will be crippled and unable to face

HOW DID YOU GET THE NAME DJ CARISMA? My real name is similar its Cathleen, and I used to watch buffy the vampire slayer a lot when I was little and one of the characters’ name was Charisma with an H. when I was a kid I always wanted my nickname to be charisma so when I was coming up with my DJ name I dropped the H and DJ Carisma was

The Trait Approach was the 1st systematic attempt to study leadership. In the 20th century it was known as the “great man” theory. This approach takes a look at the leaders personal attributes such as but not limited to: motivation, energy, intuition, creativity, persuasiveness and foresight. Some of the traits that are essential to this list include: intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity and sociability. Thus it focuses mainly on the leader and not on the followers or situations. The strengths of the Trait Approach includes: 1) it is intuitively appealing, 2) it has research to back it’s theory, 3) it highlights the leader, 4) it identifies what the traits of a leader should have and whether the traits we do

Transformational leadership are classified into four components which are pointed out by Bass (1990, p. 28), ‘charisma, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration’. Apart from these basic roles, charisma leadership, a collection of personal characteristics, has its own role of literature since it has similarity with transformational leadership and they are contribution to each other (Bertocci, 2009, p. 43; Judge & Piccolo, 2004, p. 755). Leaders’ behaviour reflects them being role models for their followers. Followers respect, admire and trust their leaders who have charismatic effect on their followers to an extremely high grade are willing to take risks

Bryman, A., 1993, ‘Charismatic leadership in business organisations: some neglected issues’, Leadership Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 289-304.

Many great leaders have one thing in common and that is charisma. Charismatic leaders are those that have the capability to inspire and encourage people to do more than they would normally do, despite obstacles and personal sacrifice. (Daft, R.L, pg. 364) Charisma is what provokes energy and commitment out of its followers. These leaders possess the power to motivate their followers to do almost anything. They create an atmosphere of change and express an ideal vision of a better future. The most common characteristics of the charismatic leader involve maturity, communication, humility, and inspiration. These unique qualities impact their followers and conduct themselves in such a way that allows for remarkable results. Then

“Leadership is more ability than job. Moreover, it is all about determination, ability to solve problems, set direction for followers, gather them for common purpose and motivating people to achieve tasks. Furthermore, it is a charisma and the ability to reacting at the right time for a particular competitive situation” (L.Mullins, 2010, P372).

Charisma theory is described as a “gift”, or a unique superiority of an individual character. This is set by an advantage of which the individual is set apart from the common man and treated as a gem with supremacies (Charismatic vs. Transformational, 2011). Whereas the transformational theory is defined as leaders who enthuse followers to use their own egocentricities to benefit the organization (Charismatic vs. Transformational, 2011). These leaders also possess a gift of having a great impact on their followers (Charismatic vs. Transformational, 2011). Theories are apprehended around the world and almost every aspect of life possesses a theory behind them, whether there is action or unfolding someone’s personality. There are two leadership theories that will be conveyed, Charismatic Leadership and Transformational Leadership. Behind each theory is a founder that explains these concepts, James MacGregor Burns the founder of Transformational leadership (Conger, n.d.) and Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber the founder of Charismatic leadership ("Transformational," n.d.). Over the course of time, movies have been made, demonstrating these theories, for example an old classic “The Lion King” ("Leadership Movies," 2008). This movie coveys both MacGregor Burns and Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber’s theories.

Researchers have proposed several characteristics of leaders described as ‘charismatic’. The widely accepted characteristics of charismatic leaders are (Bryman et al., 2011, p. 90-91):