Charismatic Leadership in Service‐producing Organizations

Presents a summary of theoretical leader behaviours and effects and the empirical findings relevant to a new genre of leadership theory. The new paradigm, emerging over the last decade and a half, focuses on outstanding leaders, variously referred to as charismatic, visionary, inspirational or transformational and derives from approximately 25 empirical investigations, based on a wide variety of samples and methods and conducted in a variety of cultures, collectively. Strong convergence among the findings of these studies indicates that the new genre of theory, when operationalized in a number of ways, accounts for substantial variance in leader and follower effectiveness, follower motivation, commitment and satisfaction as well as team performance. Discusses the relevance of such leadership to service‐producing organizations.