This week’s lecture is about charismatic and transformational leadership. According to Weber, charismatic leadership is when a leader has a divine supernatural quality, known as charisma. Charisma is a process of influencing major change in attitudes and assumption over large number of people. Charismatic leadership start with leader personal meaning, followed by good leader behavior and attribution of charismatic leadership. A charismatic person has to be the same in public and in himself and not split personality. Personal meaning is the characteristic which a leader himself aim to have. Sources of personal meaning can be from self-identity, legacy, culture, religion, political orientation, hobbies and moral values. For a person to be charismatic leader, one should have inspired trust, self confidence in moral conviction, good verbal skills, visionary, self-promoting, empowering other, having minimum internal conflict, relational power base, orienting towards high energy action and orienting towards high risk. A leader should develop a good visionary skill, practice to be a good candid and develop humanistic attitude, enthusiastic optimistic and energetic personality. There are 2 types of charismatic leaders which are personalized charismatic leader which focus on the leader’s own personality such as Adolf Hitler, the other is socialized charismatic leader which focus on organizational goods such as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Transformational leadership focus on what leader accomplish and not their personal characteristic or follower reaction. According to Bass and Avolio, the dimension of transformational leadership are idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration and inspirational motivation. Idealized influence is known as charisma. Intellectual stimulation is when the leader provides follower training. The process of transformation starts with recognizing the need for change, then creating a new vision, manage the transition and followed by institutionalize the change.

In this week, I learn about another important dimension of being a leader which is charismatic. Charisma is very important to bring follower to together to achieve a common goal. But a charismatic leader should have a right moral and ethics and focus on organizational goods not on leader’s own self. Adolf Hitler is a great example that is very charismatic but on wrong sides.