Why and When Followers Sacrifice: A New Look at Charismatic-Transformational Leadership

According to Bass (1985), charismatic-transformational leadership fosters followers’ willingness to sacrifice (i.e., the readiness to go beyond expectations and transcend self-interests for the good of the organization and the whole). Drawing on an identity perspective, this paper aims to refine the theoretical link between charismatic- transformational leadership and followers’ sacrificing. In our theoretical framework, we consider processes at the societal level (rate of complex change; Beck, 2009; value erosion; Sennett, 2005) as moderators of the above mentioned relation. Although these societal- level processes increase followers’ demand for meaning and orientation, they seem to prevent (rather than foster) charismatic- transformational leadership’s capacity to provide meaning and orientation to followers. As a result, observed sacrificing may also be explained as coping behavior (Lazarus, 1991) against as harmful experienced feelings of existential uncertainty (Heidegger, 1929). Such coping occurs m...