From where we sit: An assessment of transformational and charismatic leadership research

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.