Charisma and the Archetypes of Leadership

The following contribution attempts to develop a charisma model in the context of business organizations, based on a social-cognitive information processing approach in the perception of leadership. It tries to operationalize charisma, departing from prototypical attributes that are inherent in the cognitive category of leadership. In contrast to the 'New Leadership Approach', we depart from a 'polymorphous phenotype' of charisma. This position is derived from the concept of charisma as Max Weber understands it. Based on the concept of 'archetypes' of leadership, four different phenotypes are then defined: the hero ('heroic charisma'), the father ('paternalistic charisma'), the saviour ('missionary charisma') and the king ('majestic charisma'). The main idea of this model is the correlation that is brought out clearly between charisma and stigma, and thus also the idea that both 'hyper-representativity' and 'anti-representativity' as well as 'social dramatization' and 'social reversion' can occasion the allocation of charisma.