Flawed from the “Get-Go”: Lee Iacocca and the origins of transformational leadership

Abstract

Get-go-noun: slang, the very beginning. AbstractTransformational leadership has undergone a critical reassessment. Rather than examining the state of the science or the conceptual confusion and contradictions inherent in the ongoing stream of transformational leadership research, this article adopts an historical perspective, looking back on the founding era of this influential concept. In particular, the article evaluates the use of Lee Iacocca, who became the personification of the transformational leadership ideal. While placing Iacocca's appeal into a particular socio-historical context, the article offers a critical weighing of that devise. This use of Iacocca as a personification and embodiment of the transformational leadership construct was, at best, a highly romanticized take on an individual. At worse, the use of Iacocca was misleading and disingenuous. The article concludes that two core flaws of transformational leadership-over-attribution and romanticizing traditional leadership behaviors-were present from the inception.

Global Mission – “Glocal” Internationalization

“…Second, the founder of "Iacocca Institute" is originally from the United States. Though Iacocca assisted to transform management and leadership in the United States in the 1980s, it also demonstrated a crisis of the nation (Spector 2013). Thorpe (1988) also commented that the identification of Iacocca as an essentially American hero, which referred that "the American underdog winning the battle of preserving the American dream" (p. 44).…”

Leadership, leadership development and all that jazz

“…This clearly will be the cultural task of social thought during the coming years. (Gellner, 1993, p. 3) In hindsight, the resurgence of the messianic heroic individualism, with its overweening emphasis on over-attribution and the romanticising of traditional leadership behaviours (Spector 2014), once characteristic of 19th century liberalism will be seen as one more reaction to fin de siecle uncertainty (Mestrovic, 1992). The alternative emerging view is to emphasize the "team as hero," and the role of community.…”

The role of CEO (auto-) biographies in the dissemination of neo-ascetic leadership styles

“…It becomes clear with the emergence of the critique of 'management' which accompanied the rise of the discourse of transformational leadership in the 1980s (Spector 2014;Tourish 2013) that the 'office' of manager began to lose its charismatic authority; at the same time the legitimacy of 'innerworldly' rational asceticism of the capitalist began to be challenged, particularly by hedonism and consumerism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This seemed to necessitate the re-emergence of a new form of charismatic authority of the 'transformational' leader who stood outside the norm, embraced irrationality, and whose charismatic authority could be grounded, as I have argued, in the narrative form of the hagiography and other forms of communication.…”

“…Several authors attribute the rise of leadership 'saints' and related religious metaphors to wider discursive legitimation, in particular the relationship between asceticism, religion and the secular, the leader/saint figure finding its legitimation in "reduced community and increased secularization" (Alvesson 2010: 51), a "crisis of the American spirit" (Spector 2014), or "social anxiety" during economically "turbulent times" (Western 2013: 126). Several of these authors thus make direct or indirect reference to Weber's idea of a 'spirit of capitalism' as a legitimizing discourse.…”

“…Several authors have pointed to this important role. Spector (2014) points to "the pedagogy offered in U.S. and U.K. MBA programmes" as essential to the hegemony of the transformational model, in particular its over-attribution and romanticization of leadership (366). Similarly, Tourish et al (2010) in an empirical examination of pedagogy and promotional materials of leading U.S. and U.K. business schools, point to the prominence of celebrity CEOs in this material, in particular their regular invitation of to make presentations to students and their presence in case study material.…”