The pervasiveness of transformational and charismatic leadership in recent
academic and practitioner writings is striking, indeed. In Part I, we descr
ibed this as a "remarkable flowering... over the last decade-and-a-half or
so." Given this pervasiveness and flowering, an assessment is certainly in
order. One way of doing this is through a literature review and a meta-anal
ysis, if there are enough data. A second way, and the one chosen here, is t
hrough a special issue examining a wide range of perspectives from various
authors. To help tie together these perspectives and their numerous present
and future implications, we have prepared the matrix in Table 1, summarizi
ng the major focus and bridging topics or crosscutting themes for each of t
he articles in Parts I and II. We then discuss this matrix as a way of prov
iding an analysis and synthesis for the assessment focus of this issue.
We developed the bridging topics from: 1 a rough content analysis of key po
ints of the articles;
2 topic areas suggested in recent reviews of leadership research;
3 our special interests and knowledge of transformational/charismatic leade
rship and the more general leadership field.
We now examine the content of the matrix in Table 1.