Charisma: An Ill-Defined and Ill-Measured Gift

TLDR

Charisma remains poorly understood despite extensive study, limiting its policy relevance. The study reviews charisma’s historical development and proposes a signaling‑theory definition to guide future research. The authors employ signaling theory to formulate a definition and recommend conceptual, operational, and modeling approaches, and conduct cocitation and bibliometric analyses of the literature. They identify definitional confusion, overlap with transformational leadership, reliance on questionnaires, and inadequate causal modeling as key barriers, and highlight literature trends and practical implications.

Abstract

We take historical stock of charisma, tracing its origins and how it has been conceptualized in the sociological and organizational sciences literatures. Although charisma has been intensely studied, the concept is still not well understood and much of the research undertaken cannot inform policy. We show that the major obstacles to advancing our understanding of charisma have included issues with its definition, its confusion with transformational leadership, the use of questionnaire measures, and that it has not been studied using correctly specified causal models. To help spawn a new genre of research on charisma, we use signaling theory to provide a general definition of charisma, and make suggestions about how charisma should be conceptualized, operationalized, and modeled. We also describe trends and patterns in articles we reviewed, using cocitation as well as bibliometric analyses, and discuss the practical implications of our findings.