EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Ronit Kark: There is still hope for the non-charismatic: The role of leader-follower intimacy in employee's performance

Presenter: Dr. Ronit Kark

Dr. Ronit Kark is a Tenured Senior Lecturer of organizational studies in the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Dr. Kark received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed her post doctoral studies at the Unversity of Michigan, Ann Habor, USA. She is an affiliate scholar at the Centre for Gender in Organizations (CGO) in the Simmons Business School , Boston. Her work has been published in various leading journals, including The Academy of Management Review, The Academy of Management Annals, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organization, Journal of Organizational Change Management and Journal of Applied Psychology. Dr. Kark serves on the editorial boards of The Academy of Management Review, The Leadership Quarterly, The International Journal of Management Review and served on the board of The Academy of Management Journal. Her current research interests include leadership, positive relationships and relatedness in organizations, identity and identification processes, gender dynamics in organizations and the role of play in creativity at work. She is the founder and first director of the graduate program "Gender in the Field: Linking Theory and Practice" in the Gender Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University. She received the Loreal-Rekanati Prize for the Study of Women and Management in Israel for her doctoral dissertation. In 2005, she was awarded the Best Paper Prize at the International Leadership Association (ILA) and the Academy of Management 2012 Award for Scholarly Contributions to Educational Practice Advancing Women in Leadership.

Title: There is still hope for the non-charismatic: The role of leader-follower intimacy in employee's performance

Abstract:

Are leaders born or made? This question has been highly debated over the last few decades with people mostly anxious about the difficulty of being charismatic leaders. Although scholars recently demonstrated that charisma can be developed, managers and leaders hold the basic assumption that you either "have it" or you "don't". While many different modes of leadership have been suggested through the years the aura and fantasies of charisma - the gift of the gods - still haunt and preoccupy practitioners, managers and researchers. Post heroic leadership perspectives and relational leadership theories suggest an alternative to charisma. In the current talk I will present two studies, a qualitative and a quantitative study, that explore the role of workplace intimacy in leader-follower relationship (defined by Kark, 2010), as an alternative to charisma and examine the dynamics of leaders' "doing distance" (their distance and closeness from their followers) and its effects on performance outcomes.