Amoral Dysfunction of Ex-Trusting Transformational Phronetic Leaders that Camouflaged Charismatic Postures

The definitions of leadership continue to be extensively discussed since it is an elusive phenomena. One reason is that successful tenured leadership is a delicate combination of elements and relationships often typified without alluding to changes over time. Leaders’ ineptness in the national arena furthered distrust and deepened crises. Students grasped as charismatic the two half-a-century leaders of the largest Israeli kibbutz federations, but research finds them only initially trusting transformational phronetic leaders. Then, after 12-14 years at the helm, their restrictions of federations’ democracy and deteriorating job functioning curbed members’ trust, competing leaders threatened their power, and it was defended by adopting an extreme ideology which they had previously rejected, that legitimized autocracy. Extremism caused crises that resulted in distrust and mass attrition. Then the leaders adopted self-serving charismatic postures, which convinced members when innovative mid-levelers’ initiatives filled the leadership vacuum created by leaders’ dysfunction, allowing kibbutzim to resume their success. This resumed success deluded scholars to believe in these postures, helped by a vague charismatic leadership concept and by co-opted research that evaded their ineffective conservatism. The findings emphasize the time and culture dimensions of tenured leadership changing combinations, the need for clear concepts when building leadership theories, the decisiveness of researchers’ close contact with reality and discerning leaders’ morality changes, and the essential allusion to field theory when explaining leadership changes. Suggestions for further research are offered.