The Relevance of Charisma for Transformational Leadership in Stable Organizations

Abstract

One of the primary dimensions of the multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ) developed by Bass and associates is idealized influence, or charisma. However, there has been very little empirical support for this dimension in a number of previous studies. We argue that this lack of support is due to the attributional nature of charisma and the situational impact on the existence of, or the need for, charismatic leadership. The current study supported this contention and provided a more parsimonious operationalization of the MLQ, which did not include the idealized influence dimension.