Que deviennent les dirigeants charismatiques, une fois leur moment de gloire arrivé ?
Dans ce nouvel article de recherche, paru en décembre dernier dans European Management Journal, je narre 30 ans de vie professionnelle d'un dirigeant européen, dont le charisme a permis de mener avec succès plusieurs transformations d'entreprises. Cette histoire est aussi celle d'un dirigeant qui a connu une carrière à rebondissements ponctuée par ses relations d'attraction-rejet avec les différentes présidents ou propriétaires avec qui le dirigeant-manager a dirigé.
Dans cet article, je montre la pertinence de l'analyse wébérienne du charisme et notamment de ce que Max Weber nomme "routinisation du charisme"... ci dessous l'introduction !
“Every charisma is on the road from a turbulently emotional life (…) every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end” (Weber, 1978 : 1120).
What becomes of charismatic top executives? Why and how do they stay on or disappear from the top of companies? Our common sense and immediate understanding lead us to think of the charismatic entrepreneur or top manager of a company as a gifted individual with personal vision, who is emotional and theatrically communicative, who creates or transforms a company and builds it into an empire. But not all stories about charismatic top executives are synonymous with success and longevity—far from it. Max Weber, the first author to offer a theory of charisma, describes it as a transitory gift that is destined to disappear or be transformed: “In its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in statu nascendi. It cannot remain stable” (1978: 246). Charisma is a dynamic of leadership and when it disappears, there is also the risk that he who carries it will disappear if he cannot find new dynamics that will allow him and his project to last. This process of disappearance or transformation, a feature of charismatic leadership that sometimes gives it a tragic dimension, is referred to by Weber as the ―routinization of charisma.
Some charismatic top executives, such as the former CEO of Vivendi Universal, Jean- Marie Messier (Khurana et al, 2008), will have careers with only one charismatic episode, while a select few will manage to reproduce these moments of grace, Apple CEO Steve Jobs being one of them. Founder of three different companies (Apple, Next and Pixar), he returned to Apple as top manager ten years after resigning, making his comeback for the millennium Jobs may be said to have led four charismatic revolutions and is an illustration of the flamboyant yet tragic image of the mythological phoenix which is consumed in flames only to be reborn from its own ashes.
Steve Jobs‘ charisma is rather exceptional: not all charismatic top executives enjoy a similarly heroic career path, but many of them, whether company founders or not, experience a similarly chaotic journey through a series of key events, a journey both of grace and disgrace, or rise and fall.
At the same time, there is another, perhaps more contemporary figure who has emerged from the recent changes in the CEO market and tin the corporate governance, and who can be added to this classic image of the charismatic founding leader: that of the transitional top manager, a charismatic figure recruited by a Board of Directors to produce a spectacular turnaround (Khurana, 2002). Once this has been achieved and it is time to settle into the position for the long term, some charismatic top executives decide to pursue otherhorizons, either of their own accord or because they have been pushed out by successors or dismissed by their boards; others prefer to stay on, developing their leadership in more ―runof- the-mill‖ ways.
But what is it about these atypical career paths? Is there an underlying logic to them? What are the "seasons‘, to use Hambrick and Fukutomi‘s terms (1991), of the charismatic top executive? Or as Weber puts it, how do they become routinized? In other words, can we identify an ideal-type for the becoming of these charismatic corporate figures? Why is this such an important question? Because previous research has shown the fascination (Meindl et al, 1985) and influence that charismatic CEOs holds over both company stakeholders (Fanelli et al, 2004; Tosi et al, 2004) and the wider public, but also the preference displayed by boards of directors for charismatic profiles when they have to recruit a new company CEO (Khurana, 2002) This is a preference that can sometimes be to the detriment of a process of refection about the suitability of a manager‘s leadership style for the mission he is being given. An understanding of the behavior and role, but also what becomes of the charismatic top manager, is therefore of great interest to boards of directors, and more broadly to those who study or participate in the procedures for the recruitment, management or succession of top executives, procedures whose impact on company strategy and performance has been demonstrated by the literature (see Finkelstein, Hambrick & Canella, 2008 for a review).
The aim of this article, which can be located between the fields of leadership (which studies leaders and leadership) and strategic leadership (which studies the characteristics and impact of top executives), is to offer a series of propositions that form an exploratory model for the becoming of the charismatic top executive. The originality of this approach is that it offers a new reading of Weber‘s model for the routinization of charisma and tests it against a concrete management scenario—the 30-year career of a European charismatic CEO.
The decision to return to Weber‘s work in order to construct a conceptual framework can be justified by the limitations of the existing studies of charismatic leadership on the one hand, and on charismatic CEOs on the other: Within leadership studies, most of the studies devoted to charismatic leadership explore a charismatic leader‘s capacity, at a given moment, to mobilize and transform. However, they ignore what becomes of this leader over a longer period, as well as the determining factors behind this development (with the notable exception of Beyer (1999), who also offered analysis of a single case over several years, that of Robert Noyce and Sematech). Furthermore, most of these studies make no distinction between the different types of leader and therefore ignore the specificity of charisma in the context of top management and the relationships of power that mark it. This particular limitation has been partly overcome by studies carried out in the related field of strategic leadership (Khurana 2002; Waldman, Javidan and Varella 2004; Agle, Nagarajan, Srinivasan and Sonnenfeld 2006; Fanelli, Misangyi and Tosi 2004; Tosi, Misangyi, Fanelli, Waldman and Yammarino 1999, 2004; Fanelli and Grasselli, 2005); these have highlighted the fascination among boards of directors and stakeholders for charismatic top managers, as well as the positive impact they can have on short-term company performance. Nonetheless, the first limitation we have identified remains, and it is here that our work begins. The intended contribution of this article is threefold: we are continuing the inclusion of
Weberian analysis of charisma in the field of leadership studies by operationalizing the idealtype of the routinization of charisma; we are providing, via a detailed case study, an illustration of this routinization process in a management context, which will allow us to verify the pertinence of the Weberian model and also develop a new analytical framework for the becoming of the charismatic top executive; and we are bringing new perspectives to the fields of strategic leadership by studying corporate leaders in their behavioral and dynamic dimensions, which remain little explored in this field.
The paper is structured as follows: The first section offers a brief reminder of the definition of charisma as provided by Weber and the ways in which it was interpreted by management scholars, and it introduces the ideal-type of the routinization of charisma. The second section outlines the methodology employed and narrates the ―saga of the 30-year career of a European charismatic CEO, William French, who has experienced nine top executive positions in the retail and fashion industries and at least three ―charismatic episodes‖. This story provides the reader with an in-depth and lively portrait of a charismatic top executive in a European context. The third section builds on our analysis of William French to suggest a hypothetical model for the early stage of routinization, i.e., the determining factors and scenarios that cause charisma among top managers to be routinized.
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