A Closer Look at the Role of Emotions in Transformational and Charismatic Leadership

Abstract

Abstract Emotion and emotion-related concepts are interspersed throughout theories of charismatic and transformational leadership. Existing research in this area articulates expected relationships of global emotion constructs such as emotional intelligence, positive affect, and negative affect to leadership. However, there has been little attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. This chapter describes some of the existing theoretical and empirical research on leadership and emotion, and proposes a framework to examine more systematically how specific emotions may influence transformational and charismatic leadership. The emotion framework is applied to two theories to demonstrate its utility in gaining a more in-depth understanding of how emotions influence leader communication, motivation, interpersonal relations, and relationship management with followers.