Charisma in times of normalcy: Leaders should prepare for crisis

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Afonso Tadeu Bernardo Vaz
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20784
• topic: Charismatic leadership; Negative emotions; Sense of urgency; Crisis unpreparedness; Liderança carismática; Emoções negativas; Sentido de urgência; Impreparação para a crise

Charismatic leadership is essentially an attribution by followers. Earlier research treated it in this manner, especially related to crises, but with time, the focus shifted to treating it as a cause, rather than an outcome. This might be explained by the attribution process not being theoretically supported in times of normalcy. This study departed from the assumption that in times of normalcy, leaders are expected to prepare for a crisis, preventing negative emotions (reactive to impending threat) that would hamper charisma attribution. Crisis preparedness was deemed insufficient to directly explain charisma attribution, and thus it requires a concomitant estimation that future crisis might be probable, producing the notion of a sense of urgency. This resulted in a moderated mediation model that was tested with 247 full-time employees. Findings support the indirect effect of negative emotions between crisis unpreparedness and charisma attributions, while the direct effect is only observed when the subjective estimation of crisis probability within a 1-year time horizon approaches the 50% probability. Findings are discussed at the light of theory and conclusions drawn as to charisma attributions in time of normalcy.