John Antonakis believes that the key to moving forward is getting back to basics: “We need to go back to basics, do some clean experiments, use clean behavioral measures, and then we can build the scaffolding on firm concrete and not on Jell-O that we have right now.” Listen in as Scott and John converse about this and other areas in the field of leadership.

Quotes From This Episode:

• On Charismatic Leadership Theory – “All the literature was written in a very abstract way… there are a lot of theoretical accounts of charismatic leaders, but it wasn’t properly defined. It was defined as if it was undefinable.”
• “We said that charisma is basically symbolic, emotional, and value-laden…so values meaning that you speak about your morals, your values, what you’re defending. Symbolic means that you can speak in pictures, and emotion is that you can signal your emotions – your confidence, your emotional state, with your body, what you say, and on your face… These things are easy to observe, they’re easy to code objectively and easy to manipulate.”
• “The process of becoming a doctor requires that one studies medicine and then gets certified to practice and uses interventions that have been tested. This doesn’t happen in leadership. People become leaders for all sorts of reasons.”
• “We need to focus more on making the world of leaders selection more professional.”