Summary

Charismatic leadership: Eliciting and channeling follower

emotions
Thomas Sya,, Calen Hortona, Ronald Riggiob
In this article from the Leadership Quarterly the author say that charismatic
leaders elicit strong emotions from followers which encourage devotion and
action, and these emotions mediate the relationship between charisma and its
effects. To advance this model, we address four points. First, we examine the
controversy surrounding charisma and argue for the suitedness of emotion in
addressing it. on moral emotions in order to advance a theory of followership-
relevant emotions (FREs) that addresses how leaders target emotions such as
admiration, compassion, and anger to produce action. Third, we advance a model
of charisma that accounts for the position of emotions in the relationship
between charismatic leaders and their followers, referred to as the Elicit-Channel
(EC) model. Finally, we consider possibilities for future research on the
relationship between charisma and emotion. When defining the charisma, they
were facing many problems .Some words in the English language, such as
charming and irritating, appear to be trait descriptions but instead denote an
individual 's tendency to elicit certain responses from others.“ Charismatic,” as a
word ,seems to follow this pattern. A typical example of lay definitions of
charisma is provided by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which defines charisma as an
“attribute of awesome and almost magical power and capacity ascribed by
followers to the person and personality of extraordinarily magnetic leaders”
(Charisma, 2007). In this definition, the actual attributes of charismatic leaders are
ignored in favor of their effects on followers.
The author says that the moral emotions to be situated into four quadrants
according to their tendency to promote in-group or out-group focus, and then to
compel affiliative or expulsive behavior. The other-praising emotions promote
affiliation with outside (often novel) forces, while the other-suffering emotions
promote in-group affiliative behaviors. The other-condemning emotions promote
expulsive behaviors toward an outgroup, while the self-conscious emotions
promote inwardly-directed expulsive behaviors that unsettle individuals' stability
and feelings of connection to their group. If one considers that charismatic
leaders, through their skillful use of behavior and rhetoric, are often able to direct
these emotions toward a target (such as a person, an idea, or another group),
then the groundwork is laid for making predictions about the emotions that
charismatic leaders will likely seek to elicit when motivating followers. To make a
prediction, two key questions need to be asked. First, what is the target that the
leader is trying to persuade followers to act toward? Second, what do they want
to do with that target? Using this framework, several broad propositions can be
drawn about the relationships between a leader's goals and the emotions they
will seek to elicit.
The elicit model of charisma stages are:
 Stage one: leader emotion elicitation
 Stage two: follower emotion
 Stage three: leader channeling behaviors response
 Stage four: follower action
 Stage five: action outcomes
Some critics of charismatic leadership have suggested that due to the many
structural challenges and conceptual ambiguities inherent in the construct, it
would be beneficial if leadership scholars were to go “back to the drawing board,”
dismantling measures of charisma into their constituent parts for individual study
and dropping the label “charisma” altogether. This is an extreme view, as it
implies that the various pieces of charisma that have been identified by
researchers do not share any meaningful core that makes them greater than the
sum of their parts. Our suggestion is more moderate. Charisma is a
multidisciplinary construct, spanning diverse fields such as sociology,
organizational research, and anthropology, each with its own unique vantage
point. It would be premature for leadership researchers to wipe their slates clean
when the scholars next door may have a wealth of in sight that could aid in
addressing the challenge at hand. Many of the problems with charisma have
stemmed from the inability to articulate clear models and definitions. If this
central problem is resolved, then it will provide researchers with a stable
theoretical base from which to review the findings of the past several decades for
further insight. We have drawn from the extant literature on emotion to provide
one possible framework for addressing this problem, but we do not presume to
have resolved it completely. If anything, we view this as a“ next step.” Our goal in
writing this has been to encourage other researchers to do the same, as we draw
from the insight of multiple fields to further advance our understanding of
charisma.