Intimacy instead of Charisma? What is happening to the public leader?

Are leaders born or made? While this question has been highly debated over the last few decades in the management literature, the public administration literature has lagged behind in an attempt to answer this question in a... [ view full abstract ]

Are leaders born or made? While this question has been highly debated over the last few decades in the management literature, the public administration literature has lagged behind in an attempt to answer this question in a manner that is relevant for public organizations (Trottier, Van Wart,and Wang 2008). Yet leaders in the public realm are still anxious about the difficulty of being charismatic leaders. Although Antonakis (2011) recently demonstrated that charisma can be developed, managers and leaders hold the basic assumption that you either ‘have it’ or you 'don’t'. While many different modes of leadership have been suggested through the years the aura and fantasies of charisma – the gift of the gods - still haunt and preoccupy practitioners, managers and researchers. Post heroic leadership perspectives and relational leadership theories suggest an alternative to charisma. Recent conceptual work has stressed the importance of workplace intimacy in leader-follower relationship (Kark, 2010). In the current study we propose that intimate leader-follower relationships may significantly impact leaders’ effectiveness and followers’ performance. Furthermore, one may compensate for the other, such that, when a leader lacks charisma high quality relations (e.g. intimate relationships) are likely to substitute the effects leader’s charisma has on follower’s performance. We develop and test a theory that suggests that leader-follower intimacy is likely to play an important role in the ability of leaders to contribute to followers’ positive inter and extra role performance in public organizations. Data collected from 45 medium level managers and 208 of their employees from a large municipality in Israel showed that charisma and intimate leader-follower relationships substitute each other in predicting in-role (creativity) and extra role (voice and OCB) performance. These findings are discussed in light of distant and close leadership, multiple levels of leadership influence and the collective and relational self-identity.