Prolonged Dysfunction of Ex-Trusting Transformational Leaders and Its Amoral Camouflage by Charismatic Postures

Abstract

Leadership is an evasive phenomenon and its constructs remain deeply contested. One reason is that leadership is a delicate combination of elements often typified without alluding to changes over time. Students grasped as charismatic the two half-a-century leaders of the largest Israeli kibbutz movements, but research finds them initially trusting transformational; then their restricting of democracy and diminishing job-effectiveness curbed members’ trust, competing leaders threatened their power, and they defended it by adopting an extreme ideology, which they had previously rejected, that legitimized autocracy. Extremism led to crises that caused distrust and mass attrition. Then the leaders adopted a self-serving charismatic posture which convinced followers only when innovative mid-levelers filled the leadership vacuum created by leaders’ dysfunction, resuming movements’ success. This deluded scholars into believing in these postures, helped by the vague concept of charismatic leadership and by co-opted students who ignored leaders’ oligarchic dominance as irreplaceable movements’ heads. The study emphasizes the changing combinations of tenured leadership, the need for clear concepts when building leadership theories, the essentialness of researchers’ close contact with reality to discern leaders’ morality changes and followers’ trust changes, and the vital role of field theory in analysis. Suggestions for further research are offered.