Differences and Similarities between Charismatic and Transformational Leadership

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Management Styles, grade: 1,0, AKAD University of Applied Sciences Leipzig, language: English, abstract: Especially in crises, companies need leaders to help them asserting themselves on themarkets and getting them through difficult times. However, not every leader alwayscomes to a satisfying result, since there might be a mismatch between the company’ssituation and the attitudes and practices of its leader. As a result, the style of leadershipplays a decisive role concerning a company’s achievements in the majority of cases.Since the style of leadership might be the critical factor when it comes to thesuccess of a business, scientists have analyzed several leadership styles, which all havedifferent characteristics and therewith also varying effects on the respective companies.Two of the most common styles are the charismatic and the transformational leadership.As their names already indicate, each of these styles has its own characteristic featuresthat affect the surroundings in a variety of ways. But as different as these two leadershipstyles might seem, they also have similarities based in their principles and attitudes.Since the opinions among scientists partly seem to be divided concerning theresemblance of the two styles on the one hand and the diversity on the other hand, thispaper consequently deals with the task to expose the differences and similaritiesbetween charismatic and transformational leadership.First, in Chapter 2 Leadership in general a short definition of leadership ingeneral is given, for describing the universal understanding of leadership and itscomponents. For being able to highlight the corresponding differences and similaritiesbetween the two special leadership styles that have to be examined, Chapter 3Charismatic Leadership and Chapter 4 Transformational Leadership analyze thecharacteristics as well as the components of charismatic and transformational leadershipin order to get a better understanding of their basic attributes. The following Chapter 5Differences between Charismatic and Transformational Leadership shows the maindistinctions between these two leadership styles, based on the perceptions of theprevious chapters. Chapter 6 Similarities between Charismatic and TransformationalLeadership underlines on the other side the general similarities and parallels betweenthe two. Chapter 7 Résumé finally summarizes the results and concludes the paper.