RETHINKING CHARISMA IN ORGANIZATIONS: AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

Abstract

This integrative literature review aims to offer a new perspective on a concept that has generated as much fascination as it has distrust in research, namely charisma as a source of leadership. Often poorly defined and misunderstood, charismatic leadership is a concept that now needs to be revised. The ambition of this paper is just that, using the contributions of an evolutionary perspective to restore charismatic leadership to a relevant object of study in organizations. Our work suggests studying charisma as a signal, and charismatic leadership as a signaling process aimed at bringing a group together as a unit around a common goal. The integrative nature of this research draws on early developments in the evolutionary approach to provide a thorough reflection on the identification of charismatic signals, their effects on the group and the information that is communicated. The objective is to propose a clear and complete understanding of what charismatic leadership is and how it can be used in organizations. The contributions of this research are therefore primarily theoretical: to extend the first developments of the evolutionary approach applied to charismatic leadership and to respond to the main criticisms of the concept. The originality of this work is also to have restored the role of the body as a tool for the transmission of information in the leadership process. But the contributions are also managerial: by converting charismatic signals into verbal and non-verbal communication techniques, we show that they can be used as a strategic resource in organizational leadership.