As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we are turning to the early 20th century German social theorist, Max Weber. While Weber’s name is not now widely known, he was as responsible as anyone else for transforming leadership into a serious subject worthy of serious study. More precisely, as we have seen even in this short course, in the distant past leaders and leadership were deemed intellectually worthy – worthy subjects for great minds to contemplate. Think Confucius, Plato, and Machiavelli. However, as the academy began to slant from the liberal arts to the social sciences, the importance of individuals in politics and economics was diminished. Humans are, after all, difficult to systematize and organize. And almost impossible to measure.
Weber could see, however, that as small states were becoming large nation-states, and that as small businesses were becoming large organizations, the world was changing. Among the changes: people with power were more important than ever. This pertained everywhere – in Europe, Asia and America, in business as in government, in education and in the military.
Here I will provide capsule descriptions of his distinctions among three types of leaders. More precisely of the three different sources from which leaders derived their power to lead. In a departure from my usual practice in these posts I will not quote Weber directly, as translations of his works from German into English are not exactly enthralling. Instead, I will provide my own summaries of the three different leadership types that Weber identified.
Max Weber’s “three pure types of legitimate authority.” They are taken from his book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, originally published in 1921.
- Type #1: Rational authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as having a legal right to do so.
- Type #2: Traditional authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as legitimate heirs to legitimate traditions – as for example, when a prince inherits the throne from his father, the king.
- Type #3: Charismatic authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as so exceptional as to merit not just extreme dedication but, also, in many cases. extreme devotion.