"Our results show that charismatic leaders not only influence followers' reaction to challenges and hindrance appraisals, but also influence the appraisal of challenge stressors as challenging. Specifically, Marines with leaders who enact more charismatic behavior appraisal challenge stressors as more challenging and responded to the appraisal with higher performance." [and] "In essence, we found that charismatic leaders turned their followers' stressor pain to performance gain"
(LePine, Zhang, Crawford & Rich, 2016, page 1055.)
What's wrong with this picture?
In 1970, George Graen and his Ph.D. students performed a qualitative and quantitative investigation of the birth of leadership in a large hotel organization (Dansereau, Graen & Haga, 1975; Graen, 1976; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). This study was an excellent opportunity for this team to empirically test the latest hypothesis from OB researchers at the Universities of Ohio State, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois (Graen, 2013). Graen was asked by his fellow Pee Wee football dad, the newly appointed CEO of a hotel, to use his professional skills to help him make his first year as CEO a success. They agreed on a year-long research and consulting contract with confidential personal interviews with the top 60 managers and professionals in both positions separately four times over the year. This contract permitted the adding of newly uncovered variables after the analysis of each wave. Interviews were a mixture of research questions to managers and problem solving questions to researchers that averaged about an hour. The surprising results of this year-long investigation did not support any of the then well-known leadership research models: namely charisma, trait, state, style, contingency situational or any other. Rather, the results revealed a better way to understand how leaders and members collaborate to make their team the best it can be given the realities of talent, time, budget and organizational support. This particular informal protocol eventually became the ideal model for leadership of new professional knowledge workers called "leader member exchange" (LMX).
This LMX model of team leader, partners and associates action was found to be anchored in the quality of trust of characters, respect of competence, and benevolence of personality the partners and associates held with their leader. After the LMX psychological contracts where developed over time and tested by both parties, the leader began treating the partner as an apprentice and helper. When the LMX contracts were weak, the leader acted as a supervisor. This difference of social contracts within the same unit became known as "team differentiation" (the variance of contracts within teams) (Epitropaki, Kapoutsis, Ellen, Ferris & Ntotsis, 2016).
Analyzing the difference between leaders behavior toward partners and associates revealed that partners were given more interesting and challenging work assignments, more instruction and guidance, more conversations about the future, greater latitude, and communications about important decisions, and preparation for promotion. In turn, partners shared more leadership and team level duties than associates. Partners exceeded at helping the leader by volunteering to take on problems to allow the leader to help coworkers from up and across the organization. They were more respected for their thinking, trusted for their character and admired for their helpfulness to coworkers throughout the organization. Specifically, they reciprocated this gift of transformation from associate to partner. Later, Bernie Bass and his students used replicated findings to design a measure they called "charismatic-transformational leadership (Bass, 1998).
The opening quote is misguided because Bernie Bass falsely assumed that if a manager would treat all of their team members as LMX partners, they would receive the same reactions as LMX-partners from all (Bass & Avolio, 1995). The error is that the LMX findings and critiques do not support this assumption (Antonakis, Bastardoz, Jacquart, & Shamir, (2016); van Knippenberg, & Sitkin, 2013). In fact, treating all of one's team as partners is likely to produce lower performance and helping by LMX partners and no improvement by LMX associates. Equally significant, this rewarding all team members merely showing up is seen as unfair unless all members fail to outgrow their jobs. Also, this may repel the needed new professional knowledge workers.
Most of the predictive performance data between teams is attributed to proportion of partners in team. After this variance is partialed out the charismas-transformational style of leader contributes nothing significant. (Dulebohn, Bommer, Liden, Brouer, & Ferris, 2012). The estimated population correlation between LMX and charisma-transformational leadership in meta-analysis is as high as reliability permits. It appears to be measuring the same construct as quality of the LMX contract. It does this by asking questions expected to show team differentiation. Logically, finding team differentiation using these questions as a unidimensional scale of charismatic behavior correctly yields support for LMX team differentiation and appears to measure the same construct. In sum, the higher the overall quality of LMX in a team the better (Graen, Hui, & Taylor 2006). This means that almost all correlations of charismatic –transformational style of leadership and leadership outcomes are really supporting LMX differentiation. How is it possible for bright and well-trained OB researchers to miss this obvious error in logic?
Based on the above findings, the opening quote reads:
"Our results show that LMX leaders not only influence followers' reaction to challenges and hindrance appraisals, but also influence the appraisal of challenge stressors as challenging. Specifically, Marines with leaders who enact moreLMX behavior appraisal challenge stressors as more challenging and responded to the appraisal with higher performance." [and] "In essence, we found that LMX leaders turned their followers' stressor pain to performance gain"
References
Antonakis, J., Bastardoz, N., Jacquart, P., & Shamir, B. (2016). Charisma: An ill-Defined and ill-Measured Gift. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3(1), 293-319.
Bass, B. M. (1998). Transformational leadership: Industrial, military, and educational impact. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. (1995). MLQ Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire For Research. Redwood CA: Mind Garden.
Dansereau, F., Graen, G., & Haga, W. J. (1975). A Vertical Dyad Linkage Approach to Leadership within Formal Organizations: A longitudinal Investigation of the Role Making Process. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 13, 46-78.
Dulebohn, J. H., Bommer, W. H., Liden, R. C., Brouer, R. L., & Ferris, G. R. (2012). A meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of leader-member exchange: Integrating the past with an eye toward the future. Journal of Management, 38, 1715-1759.
Epitropaki, O., Kapoutsis, I., Ellen III, B. P., Ferris G. R., Konstantinois, D. & Ntotsis, (2016). Navigating uneven terrain: The roles of political skill and LMX differentiation in prediction of work relationship quality and work outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Version of Record online : 22 MAR 2016, DOI: 10.1002/job.2100
Graen, G. B. (1976). Role making processes within complex organizations. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 1201-1245). Chicago: Rand-McNally.
Graen, G. B. (2013). The missing link in network dynamics. The Oxford Handbook of Leadership, M. Rumsey (Ed.). (pp. 359-375). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Graen, G., B., Hui, C., & Taylor, E. A. (2006) Experience-based learning about LMX leadership and fairness in project teams: A dyadic directional approach. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 5(4), 448-460.
Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. Leadership Quarterly, 6, 219-247.
LePine, M. A., Zhang, Y., Crawford, F. R. & Rich, B. L. (2016). Turning their Pain to Gain: Charismatic Leader Influence on Follower Stress Appraisal and Job Performance Academy of Management Journal 59, 3, 1036-1059. doi:10.5465/amj.2013.0778
van Knippenberg, D. & Sitkin, S. B. (2013). A Critical Assessment of Charismatic-Transformational Leadership Research: Back to the Drawing Board? Academy of Management Annals, 7, 1, 1-60.