Custom «Why Isn't Charisma Measured» Essay Paper Sample

Charismatic and transformational leadership theories are necessary in the process of describing leaders and their unique relationships with their followers. Transformational leadership involves the moral uplifting of followers and needs a leader to have moral maturity. On the other hand, charismatic leadership is similar to transformational leadership, as it examines the relationship between the leader and the followers and focuses on issues relating to vision, risk-taking, enthusiasm and confidence and it is argued that the two theories overlap as they all identify important and unique leadership process aspects.

Various measurement scales such as the Conger_Kanungo Charisma scale, the Followership Scale , the Romance for Leadership Scale and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire have been designed to measure the two theories but they have failed to effectively measure the communication of charisma even if they both embrace the importance of communication to charisma.

Even if charisma forms the chore both charismatic and transformational leadership theories, the study of the two leadership theories based on the measurement scales gives a great insight to it but there is little consensus on its proper definition. The study implies that some important elements of charisma cannot be measured. For instance, these measurement scales are unable to measure the charismatic communication.

This is due to lack of diversity of the measurement instruments or failure in including all the important/central elements of the leadership theories leading to a partial understanding of charisma and hence leadership behaviors. Also, the available measurement scales that are used in the studies do not contain all the behaviors that are associated with charisma. Due to these problems, charisma is not measured because the studies produce an incomplete picture of the practice and theory of leadership. In conclusion, charisma measurement fails due to inadequacies and weaknesses in the measurement scales.