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Leader Motives, Charismatic Leadership, and Subordinates' Work Attitude in the Profit and Voluntary Sector.

Original publication by Annebel H.B. De Hoogh, Deanne N. Den Hartog, Paul L. Koopman, Henk Thierry, Peter T. Van den Berg, Joost G. Van der Weide, Celeste P.M. Wilderom
In The Leadership Quarterly, Elsevier Inc., Volume 16, Issue 1, 2005, pp. 17-38

Synopsis by Phoebe Kinzie-Larson, Claremont McKenna College '08 and LR staff

The past few decades have seen a flowering of research in the areas of transformational and charismatic leadership. Beyond theory explication and development, many empirical studies and meta-analyses have investigated relationships between charismatic leadership and outcome measures such as attitudes of subordinates.

This paper provides an in-depth literature review. Bass (1985), Burns (1978), House (1977), and others have discussed the importance of vision, articulation, and common values to secure followers' commitment. House and Howell (1992) found that traits such as self-confidence, need for social influence, social responsibility, cognitive achievement orientation, energy, creativity and enthusiasm distinguish charismatic leaders from others. Researchers such as McClelland (1975, 1985) have investigated three basic motives: power, affiliation, and the achievement motive. McClelland and Burnham (1976) labeled the combination of high power motivation, low affiliation motivation, and high attention to moral use of power as the Leadership Motive Profile(LMP). House and others described these motivations as contributing to charismatic leadership.

Building on that tradition, De Hoogh et al. explore the interaction of leader motives (moral responsibility), charisma, and subordinates' work attitude. Data is compared for the for-profit and voluntary sectors. The study uses both survey data and data coded from interviews to reach its conclusions.

To actually conduct their experiment, the team focused on 300 small and medium-sized organizations, ranging in size from 50 to 250 employees. They also recruited 73 CEOs: 52 CEOs in the for-profit sector and 21 in the voluntary sector. Through personal interviews and questionnaires, they formulated questions around the "charismatic" aspects of the leadership qualities that subordinates noted about their bosses, or that the CEOs themselves expressed as their goals or motives in leadership decisions or on the job in general.

Outcome results indicated a positive relationship between the power motive and charismatic leader behavior. Yet there was a marginal, negative relationship between the affiliation motive and charismatic leader behavior. While no relationship was found between the achievement motive and charismatic leader behavior, it was an interesting observation that, "a high achievement motivation may be as much a liability as an asset for managers in organizations."

Overall, the results of this study added to previous evidence that there is a positive relationship between charismatic leadership and the morale of subordinates. Also, results suggested that charismatic leaders of voluntary organizations tend to use power in a responsible way.